In the Shadows
by Gem4
Summary: Someone from Alec's past resurfaces unexpectedly, leaving Max hurt by his lies of omission, and setting White on the prowl.
1. Default Chapter

Disclaimer:  I don't own any of the characters, not a one.  They are the property of James Cameron and Charles H. Eglee, and more power to them for it.  I'm just borrowing them for a little while for my own amusement and, hopefully, yours.

Rating:  PG13

Timeline:  Takes place about two months after "Freak Nation."

Author's Note:  This is my first "Dark Angel" fic – I've been doing BtVS/Ats fanfic exclusively for the past few years.  But "The Berrisford Agenda" has been one of my favorite hours of television since it aired, and I decided it was time I did something about it. g  Just a word of warning:  I don't know any beta-readers who do DA, so this is coming straight from me to you.

In the Shadows

Part 1

By Gem

Logan Cale frowned as he pulled up the south gate of Terminal City.  The gate was closed, which by itself was unusual these days, and up in a water tower to the left of the gate he spied Mole.  

And Mole's assault rifle pointed directly at his car.

A moment later the weapon was raised and Mole pulled back, presumably to flip the switch that started the gate creaking open.  As Logan drove through the gate and down the road, half his mind working on the question of why guards were posted at the gates over a month after the siege at Terminal City had supposedly ended.  The hostages had refused, to a man, to press charges; the residents of Terminal City had paid the city for all the overtime and damages incurred by the police force in the course of dealing with the crisis, and the rest of Seattle's population had supposedly embraced the idea of transgenics living together instead of next door.  All was supposed to be forgiven if not forgotten.  And yet Transgenic Central was obviously armed and prepared for trouble.

Unfortunately, while the sight of the guards was worrying, it was a worry Logan didn't have time for right now.  He was a man with a mission and the sooner he accomplished his objective, the better.  Because he had to find Alec, and he had to find him before Max did.

Of course right when he wanted to avoid her, there she was, standing in the doorway of the old factory they'd set up as headquarters and looking like she'd been waiting just for him.

"Hey you, what are you doing here?"

_Okay, so maybe she hadn't been waiting there just for him._

"Max, hey."  He smiled weakly as he got out of the car.  "I just thought I'd drop by and, umm, say hello and, well..."

Max's radar started pinging at the sound of his stammering.  Logan was normally fairly cool and relaxed, especially under duress.  It took a lot to shake him, and she wasn't used to something else being able to do that besides the subject of their relationship.  As far as she knew, that shouldn't be making him stammer these days either. 

As far as she knew.

"Logan, what's wrong?"

"Wrong?" he asked blankly.

"You're all..." she gestured up and down his lanky frame, "twitchy.  Kind of like a cat when it smells a rabbit moving into the neighborhood.  What has you so on the ropes?"  

He couldn't help but look surprised.  He felt like an idiot, sneaking around behind Max's back with secret messages, but he hadn't realized he looked like one as well.  

"I, uh, have a message."  He slipped past her, knowing the Manticore-induced retrovirus running through her veins would make her back up even if she wanted to stop him.  "For Alec," he clarified as his eyes swept the first floor for the transgenic in question.

Max tilted her head and frowned as she followed him back into headquarters.  She should have been relieved to learn his nerves had nothing to do with her, but instead she was just more confused.  Puzzles within puzzles; Logan didn't usually play deliveryman.  

"So now you're taking his messages?  And I thought he had Joshua well-trained."  

He grimaced, but rose above the jibe.  The important thing was to get past Max before she asked any questions he didn't want to answer.  "Apparently his cell phone is out of commission."

Her face cleared.  "Yeah, the locals have been getting back into the sabotage game; that's why we have the guards on duty again.  So far they've just done something to jam the cell phone signals."  She shrugged; _chalk one up to the fortunes of war.  "Dix is trying to fix it, but no luck so far."_

"Well that explains what Mole was doing back on duty.  Let me know if Eyes Only can help at all."

She wasn't interested in battle tactics right now, not when there was obviously a bigger mystery going on right under her nose.  "So who called Alec?" she asked.  

Her stance was as casual as her voice, but on Max the look only meant trouble; she knew something was up, and she knew he knew that she knew something was up.  He could stall and try to talk his way out of it, or he could take the fast approach, tell her a half-truth and leave the rest up to Alec when it was over.

"Original Cindy."

"Oh, well, hey, that makes perfect sense," she scoffed.  "Yeah, she's chattin' him up every day; doing the girl talk thing.  She must have gone crazy when she couldn't check in."

Logan gave up subterfuge and headed straight for the point.  "Do you know where he is?"

She didn't want to admit it, but Max's feelings were a little hurt.  Logan used to look forward to spending time with her, and she'd thought since he realized they could touch if gloves were involved, things were getting better.  Apparently she'd overestimated his fondness for both latex gloves and her.

"What's the rush?  Can't you stay and talk?  Or does everyone like talking to Alec better these days?"

"Look, she has a... a situation... at Jam Pony and she needed to talk to Alec about it and..."

Max abruptly shifted into action mode, something Logan usually found more endearing than he did right now.  He loved her fighting spirit; he just didn't want to end up on the wrong side of it.

"What kind of situation at Jam Pony?  Have White's men come back?  Or are the police hassling them again?"

He waved away her suspicions, though a small part of him admitted his choice of words could have been better.  "Not that kind of situation.  Nothing to do with the transgenics as a whole, just him."

Max tapped one finger against her chin.  "Hmm.  Alec and 'a situation.'  Now there's a shock."  She sighed.  "How much is it going to cost this time?"

"It's not... is he here? Because Original Cindy was kind of at the end of her rope."

Max was starting to get worried again.  Logan was acting seriously weird in her opinion, and her antennae were already in hyper mode at the mention of Alec's name.  It seemed like trouble and Alec went together just like... well, like she used to think she and Logan did.

"Logan, what's wrong?  Why won't you tell me what's up?"

"I need to tell Alec first," he insisted.  "I mean I need to tell him and then he really should be the one to tell you because it's his business and..."

"Oh, that's not the kind of argument our Maxie likes to hear, Logan," Alec teased from the metal walkway above.  "Everything in Terminal City is supposed to be her business; didn't you get the memo?"

"Don't call me 'Maxie'," she snapped without looking up.  Alec was the source of her worries right now... mostly... so Alec could take the heat.  "Especially not if you're attaching words like 'our' or 'mine' to it.  A genetically enhanced gag reflex is not something you want to be messing with."

Alec ran lightly down the stairs, looking pleased to have once again ruffled Max's feathers.  It wasn't like it was so hard to do, he reflected silently; it was just... fun.  From what he could tell, Max got a charge out of it too.

Not so very long ago Max had fooled Logan into believing there was something romantic between she and Alec, but seeing them like this, fighting like the cats and dogs who had contributed to their DNA 'cocktail', Logan wondered why he'd ever been taken in.  They were brother and sister, and unlikely friends, but nothing more.  

And nothing less.

"So what brings you to our little corner of the world, Logan?" Alec asked when he reached the first floor.  "Air too fresh and breathable out among the ordinaries?"  He cocked his head to the side and smiled broadly as he drawled, "Come on, admit it; you missed me."

Max looked chagrined; if anyone remembered Logan's vulnerability to the air in Terminal City, it should have been the woman who loved him.

"You probably shouldn't be here," she told him quickly, concern darkening her face.  "And he wouldn't be if it wasn't for you," she spit out a minute later, turning back to glare at Alec.

Her fellow X5 looked confused, and a little wounded.  Teasing aside, he and Max had been getting along much better since the move to Terminal City, or at least so he'd thought.  Her sudden flat-out hostility was beginning to make him wonder if their new camaraderie existed more in his mind than in reality, and that bothered him.  He was actually surprised by how much it bothered him.

"I didn't call him, Max."  He pulled out his cell phone, at the moment carried more from habit than potential usefulness.  "I couldn't, remember?"

"Yeah, and that's why he's here," she snapped.  "He's picking up your messages."

Alec visibly brightened.  "Is she cute?  Please say yes, because with this whole big state of siege going on, things got kind of slow for a while.  And a man can only stand so many 'great personality' nights before he starts to go a little... squirrelly."

"Like you ever stopped talking long enough to notice anyone else's personality," Max mocked him.

Alec smirked as he leaned over to brush his knuckles back and forth along her cheekbone.  "I noticed your Type A the first day we met, sunshine."

She knocked his hand away from her face and scowled.  "Oh please, as if you were looking for anything but a mirror in that cell."

Logan looked from one to the other as confusion warred with a sudden sense of loneliness.  They'd been doing this to him more and more since they started spending so much time together running Terminal City; it was like they had their own routine worked out and there was no place for him in it.  

"Wait, is who cute?"  

"The girl who called for me," Alec explained, as though it should have been obvious.  "It was a girl, right?  You wouldn't come all the way over to Toxic Town just to tell me that Sketchy wants to knock a few back at a strip club tonight... not that I'd mind, of course, but..."

"It was Original Cindy," Logan broke in.  

"Okay, well, she is a girl," Alec conceded doubtfully.  "And she's a looker, don't get me wrong.  But she's not exactly my type, and I'm sure not hers."

"You just wish you were, pretty boy," Max jeered.

Alec raised his eyebrows and briefly examined her suggestion.  "Actually, no," he answered after due consideration.  "Having seen what you girls go through just to get ready to go out for a cup of coffee, I think I'd rather stay the way the mad scientists made me."

"Annoying?" Max asked brightly.  "Yeah, I bet there was a big ol' party in the lab the night they isolated that genome."

Logan decided to take another stab at delivering his message.  When Max and Alec started fighting, with words or fists, the best choice was to keep regrouping and repeating.  Sooner or later one of them would get frustrated enough to listen.

He hoped.

"She was delivering a message."

"Another message?"  Alec scratched his dark blond hair and frowned.  "I thought we got out of that biz when Detective Clemente blinked."

"That was packages, idiot," she smacked Alec's hand away from his head with the flat of her palm, "not messages.  No wonder you got such lousy tips." 

His eyes lit up along with his smile.  "You have no idea, Maxie; no idea."

"I told you to stop calling me..."

"Look, Alec, maybe we could go somewhere and talk for a minute?" Logan suggested desperately.  "Somewhere private," he stressed, nodding slightly at Max.

Alec caught his meaning immediately, as did Max.

"Hey, I could care less what creepy little secrets Alec is keeping," she said loftily.  "I just can't figure out how he got my girl involved.  She's usually too smart for one of his cons."

Alec was a little hazy on that last point himself; he hadn't talked to Original Cindy in a few weeks, and that was just in passing when she came to see Max.  Whatever was up with her, and apparently with him, it couldn't be much if he didn't even know about it.

"Listen, we have no secrets here," he said smoothly.  "We can't – we've got too many people trained in covert ops.  You might as well just tell me what she said, and then I'll think of a way to talk myself out of the part Max want to yell at me for."

Logan ran his hand through his already disheveled hair and sighed as he gave up the fight.  "Good luck with that fast talking idea, because I don't see how you're going to manage it.  Original Cindy said there's a man at Jam Pony who needs to see you..."

"Is that all?" Alec broke in.  "Must be someone I used to do business with or..."

"Or a detective," Logan interrupted in turn.  "In fact he is a detective, and he has a little girl with him he says you were looking for."  He glanced at Max, bracing inwardly for the explosion.  "He says she's your daughter."

* * * * *

Logan had been expecting smothered, or perhaps not so smothered curses, from Max.  At the very least, he'd been expecting a yell.  He wasn't prepared for her giggling; he wasn't even sure when he'd last heard her make such a sound, if he ever had.

"Daughter?" Max repeated in disbelief, when she had gained the breath to speak.  "Is he crazy or just tripping?"  Her amusement died quickly, however, when she considered her own suggestion.  "Have you started dealing again, Alec, because if you have, so help me..."

"She's really with him?" Alec asked sharply, not even hearing Max's nervous chatter.  "They're at Jam Pony right now?"  He started towards the entrance without waiting to hear the answer.

"Alec, wait!" Max called.

He halted, but just barely.  She could see him shifting his weight restlessly from one foot to the other, poised to dart out at any moment.

"What... what's Logan talking about?  This is a joke, right?  I mean, you and a kid?  A girl kind of kid at that... it's just..." she threw up her hands, "nuts."

Alec's face bore no trace of his normal good humor, not even the kind he put on for show.  "Name me one thing about Manticore that wasn't nuts, Max."

"Manticore?  But what..."

Alec didn't have time for this, however much he felt for Max at the moment.  He understood that she must be feeling betrayed and confused and left out in the dark, along with a sizeable dose of her usual Alec-induced exasperation.  Normally he'd let her vent, at least until she started repeating herself, but today he just didn't have the time.

"Look Max, believe it or not, this is real.  And I really have to go."

"Go where?" she asked, not sure what answer she wanted, let alone what she would get.

"Jam Pony," he answered simply.  "You heard the man: I've got to get my kid."

* * * * *

"The danger, gentlemen," Ames White nodded his head belatedly at the 2 female agents in the third row "and ladies, is real.  Even though officially, it doesn't exist."  He paused for emphasis.

"Officially."

He had their attention with that one word, and he knew it.  He knew that deep down each of them relished working just the other side of the visible, live-by-the-rules-or-face-the-consequences world.  In their world the only consequences were for failure or discovery; and with his guidance, neither would be an issue.  That's what these briefings were all about.

"The transgenic problem is officially no longer a problem, at least not on the federal level.  Since the siege at Terminal City, it has been decided... officially decided... that any transgenic issues are to be solved on a local level."  He smirked, knowing he would have them all eating out of the palm of his hand with his next words.  "Since we all know what a splendid job they did resolving the hostage situation in Seattle."

White knew his agents had all been fuming since the city had announced the terms of agreement with the residents of Terminal City.  He had them all convinced that it was the local authorities who forced him to bring in an outside team instead of using his own people to end the crisis, and that had his people been used, the city would never have succumbed to the transgenics' offer of money to smooth over the situation.

"Thanks to this official policy, we now have a new unofficial problem.  The transgenics have been exposed; Joe Schmoe on the street knows there are mutants... sorry, artificially created humans... out there, and he knows how to identify them.  This has driven the transgenics into Terminal City in droves.  They can't blend in anymore, and they're trying to convince themselves they don't want to.  They want to be a community."  His voice dripped sarcasm, the closest he could come to expressing his inner rage and disgust at the situation.  "And in time, they will want to be families within the communities.  In other words, transgenic children."

He saw one or two hands shoot up in the back of the room; overachieving new agents eager to prove they'd done their homework.  They were annoying, but easily manipulated, which was the only reason he put up with them.

"And yes, before anyone feels the urge to read to me from my own reports, I am aware that the Terminal City siege actually began with the birth of a transgenic baby."

The hands in the back of the room abruptly dropped out of sight.  

"That baby, according to latest intelligence, displays no barcode, and little or no inherited X-series characteristics.  In other words, we got lucky.  But people," he leaned forward on the podium and dropped his voice as though about to confide a secret, "luck runs out."

He stood up straight again and glanced all around the room before he continued.  "We know for a fact that one transgenic produced a partially transgenic child after pairing with a human, someone just like you and me.  But now that the transgenics are pulling out of general society, the chance of that scenario happening again are slim.  Add in the fact that the traits would only be coming from one side of the pair, and certain characteristics are sex-linked... the odds continue to go down.  No, the real danger today comes from an X-series pairing with another X-series.  Sources say they were already experimenting with the idea when the Seattle facility burned, but they weren't far enough along to calculate a success ratio."

White gripped the podium tightly, his whole frame radiating the importance of his message.  "Ladies and gentlemen, the Seattle facility burned down 10 months ago.  40 weeks.  Any pregnancies that resulted from the Manticore breeding program are about to bear fruit, so to speak.  And a whole new generation of transgenics is about to be unleashed on the unsuspecting world.  We don't know what they will be capable of; we don't know if they will bear any identifying marks such as a barcode.  All we know is that we are in big trouble."

"Unofficially." 

* * * * *

The explosion Logan had prepared himself for did come, but Max managed to hold herself together until they were in the car following Alec's motorcycle across town to Jam Pony.  Alone in the car, Logan noted ruefully.  Alone in the suddenly very small car, where he had no place to hide and lucky Alec was nowhere within range of the ire he had provoked.

"He has to get his kid," she repeated in amazement, for at least the fourth time.  "Like I'm supposed to let him just walk out with a line like that and not say anything."

"He did just walk out," Logan pointed out, knowing he would regret keeping her anger fueled yet somehow unable to help himself.

"You're darn right he did," she agreed indignantly.  "Just walked out like it was the most obvious thing in the world that he has this kid... a daughter at that."  She pressed one flattened hand to her chest and gave Logan a wide-eyed glance.  "I almost can't say it; it's just too... too weird.  And I have seen some weirdness in my life," she asserted strongly, as though Logan called her experience into question.

"I know you have," he assured her.  "Between Joshua and Mole and Dix and the Gossamer and..."

"And the mermaid, don't forget her," Max added with an emphatic wave of her hand.  "The point is I know weird; I even live with weird..."

"Suddenly glad I have my own place," Logan muttered under his breath.

"But this is way, way weird," she continued, not paying attention to Logan's asides.  "I mean how could he not tell me something like this?  How could Alec, of all people, keep this a secret?  He can't keep anything a secret; he's yapping like 25 hours a day.  How could he talk that much and not tell me?"

Logan shot her a worried look, suddenly wondering if his earlier estimation of her relationship with Alec was wrong after all.  He'd thought they'd grown closer since the siege; she'd finally admitted there was nothing between she and Alec except a strange sort of friendship, and the time he had spent with the two of them had seemed to back that up.  Now he was forced to wonder if the lack of a romantic relationship was due just to Alec's indifference, not a mutual disinclination.

"Max," he said hesitantly, "why does this bother you so much?  I mean I thought it would because you'd think he'd been irresponsible..."

"Again!" she fumed.

"Yeah, that."  Logan conceded that point without argument; there really was none he could offer.  "But it seems to me like you're angrier that he didn't tell you what he did rather than that he did it.  Or am I wrong?"

She stared at him across the car seat, trying to figure out why he was so freaked by her being freaked.

"Well of course I'm mad that he was irresponsible," she said finally.  "But he's Alec; it's almost a given.  Or it was," she grudgingly allowed in the interest of fairness.  "But if this kid is the lack of surprise that she seems to be to him, we're talking old Alec behavior here anyway."

"So it's just that he didn't tell you, tell you specifically," he stressed, "that you're angry about?"

She frowned as an unlikely suspicion tickled at the back of her mind.  Or maybe it wasn't so unlikely, she admitted silently, given what she'd tried to do just a few short months ago.

"Logan" she asked slowly, "are you jealous?"

He forced a sharp laugh, though he didn't see much humor in the situation.  "Jealous?  Of Alec?  You mean just because you spent so much time trying to convince me that you two were an item, and now that you say it was all a well-meaning scam, you're acting all hurt because he didn't confide in you?  Why would that make me jealous?"

She leaned over and rested her gloved hand on the sleeve of his leather coat, well above his exposed hand on the steering wheel.

"Logan, of course I'm hurt he didn't tell me," she said softly.  "I thought I was getting through to him... I thought we all were.  He was all fast talk when he first crashed his way into my life; he spent so much time jabbering it was hard to notice he never actually said anything.  Then when that girl died..."

"Rachel Berrisford," Logan said with a nod.

"Right."  Max's own nod was crisp, almost as much as her tone became.  "When she died he shut down so tight I didn't think he'd ever let anyone in again.  But then he and Joshua started to connect and I thought... I thought I did too.  I mean he opened up his own little transgenic Underground Railroad at Jam Pony, and it seemed like maybe there was hope for him.  Like maybe he finally realized he was one of us, not just Alec against the world.  And then this."

A stubborn part of Logan fought against really hearing her words, but his innate sense of fairness, not to mention his love for her, kept getting in the way.

"Max, we don't know how old this girl is, but he did mention Manticore so I'm guessing she isn't a recent arrival.  And you're right – he was shut down for a long time, and when he finally started trusting you... imagine how hard it would be for you to say, 'Oh by the way, I also have a daughter I never told you about'?"

She eyed him through narrowed eyes, reminding him forcefully of her feline DNA.  "You don't, do you?"

"Don't what?"

"Have a daughter you..."

"Never told you about?" he finished for her.  "Not unless no one told me either."

He was smiling when he answered her, but that only made her frown settle deeper.

"That wasn't as comforting as it should have been," she grumbled.

"Max."

"Oh all right!"  She scowled and crossed her arms over her chest.  "Alec must have had his reasons, and as for you... well, I guess we'll just have to wait and see."

* * * * *

On an ordinary day Alec would have had no trouble beating Logan to Jam Pony with time to spare, especially since he had a head start.  But this was no ordinary day, not by a long shot, and although his speed was more than adequate, his distraction cost him serious time; he arrived at the garage only a minute or two ahead of his well-meaning pursuers.

He didn't notice his former coworkers starting to hail him as he walked in the door, any more than he noticed when their arms fell to their sides and their voices died off at the recollection of his last day of work.  All his attention was focused on the group in the center of the garage.

Reagan Ronald, better known to his under-impressed and overworked employees as 'Normal,' was sitting cross-legged on the floor, while an amused Sketchy, and a hyped-up Original Cindy stood watch on either side.  The detective Alec had hired, and paid many times over, was facing them, and facing Alec.  But no one noticed Alec, just as he didn't see them; everyone was intent on the tiny stranger in the room.

She was sixteen months old now, or maybe seventeen; Alec had never been told her exact date of birth.  Her hair was still the dark gold that he remembered, just a shade lighter than his own, and her eyes seemed to have settled from their initial infant blue to a mossy green.  She had been toddling from one adult to another when he walked in, chattering away to the amusement and amazement of all assembled.  But she seemed to sense Alec's presence even before she saw him; she stopped talking and turned from Sketchy to fix him in her bright-eyed gaze.

"Hey man, check it out."  Sketchy gestured to the little girl with a broad grin on his thin face.  "She talks and everything."

Alec forced himself to stop looking at her, dragging his eyes away to confront the detective.

"I'm sorry I had to bring her here," the man quickly apologized.  "I've been trying to get you on your cell, but no dice.  And you said if I ever needed to find you, this was the place to start, with that girl Max you told me about."

"No, it's fine."  Alec brushed away the detective's explanation as just so much noise.  "But are you sure..." he paused to clear his unexpectedly tight throat, "it's her?" 

The detective nodded as he pulled a small piece of paper out of his pocket and waved it.  "Barcode checks out.  See for yourself."

Alec didn't bother to take the proffered paper; he didn't need it.  He had memorized her bar code the first and only time he had seen it, preparing for a day just like this one.  Slowly he walked over to the child and crouched down in front of her.  With one shaking hand he lifted the golden curls at her neck and leaned around to see what lay beneath them.  

And suddenly he was back almost a year in time, to the night he'd first seen this mark.

* * * * *

// He crept into the nursery, shooting repeated glances over his shoulder to check for guards.  His intelligence had indicated that midnight was the crucial shift change – the one time during the day when both the guards and the nursing staff changed at the same time.  But after all that had happened the last time he disobeyed orders, he wasn't going to take any chances.

Not take any chances: that was a laugh.  He knew he was taking a huge one just wanting to be here, let alone following through on the idea.  He wasn't even sure why he was doing it, but here he was and here, somewhere, so was she.

Manticore was essentially a military installation, so even the nursery was arranged more like a barracks.  Crib after crib was lined up against the far wall, below a bank of small windows; he moved silently from one to the next, searching for the designation ' X5' among the infant X7's and 8's.  After three tries he finally caught a break.

He'd thought she would be sleeping; it was midnight after all.  But instead it almost seemed like she was waiting for him.  She was sitting up quietly in her crib, tiny fingers pulling at the fuzz on her blanket, wisps of dark blonde hair framing a grave little face.

Then she saw him and she smiled.  And he fell in love for the second time in his life.

She was beautiful.  And she was his.  His daughter, no matter how strange the idea was to wrap his mind around.  Until this moment, he had never had anything to truly call his own; even he was technically considered government property.  Renfro would probably say this little girl was too, but he couldn't make himself see it that way.  She belonged to him and he would find a way to keep her safe.

He bent over the crib and slipped his hands around her tiny body, lifting her awkwardly to his shoulder.  He'd never held a baby before; he'd barely even seen them in the course of his work for Manticore, and for the first time he realized what a blessing that was.  For all the unconscionable things he had done for his masters, he had never had to hurt one so small and defenseless.

She must not have felt comfortable with the hold he had on her; she gripped his shirt tightly between her little fingers and pulled herself up to burrow into his neck.  He couldn't let himself laugh for fear of attracting the guards or the nurses, but he didn't have to hold back his grin.  She was strong, and she was smart too; no doubt about, she was his.

"Hey, monkey," he whispered, "bet you never expected to see me, did ya?  I'm your," he paused over the sheer enormity of it, "I'm your daddy." //

* * * * *

Alec pulled himself back from the past with reluctance.  A part of him wanted to pretend that all the intervening time had never happened; then he could go back and do things over.  Do them right.  But for all the advanced technology at their disposal, Manticore had never experimented with time-traveling transgenics.  Now was all he had.  

He shifted his weight back onto his heels, allowing him to look her in the eye and smile gently.  Without thinking, his hand slipped around to cup her cheek.  

"Hey, monkey," he said softly, "bet you don't remember me."

Alec hadn't expected an answer, at least not the right one, but he got it anyway.

"You Daddy," she said seriously.  A moment later a quick, partially toothless grin flashed across her little face; combined with her surprising answer it almost took Alec's breath away.

"Did you tell her?" he asked the detective.

"She told me," the man answered with a shake of his head.  "Damnedest thing I've ever seen.  Kids that age aren't supposed to talk, you know, at least not like that.  But it's a good thing she did or I never would have gotten her out of that hospital."

"Hospital?"  Alec's gaze swept back to the little girl as he anxiously looked her up and down for signs of an injury.  "Why was she in a hospital?"

"Observation.  She was in a foundling home that burned to the ground last night.  Firefighter found her wandering around and brought her in."

"Burned?" Max asked sharply as she strode into the garage.  "Did they find out what happened?"

Normal waved a disparaging hand.  "Nurse on a cigarette break; I can almost guarantee it.  Those things are death on a stick, little lady."

"Nah, witnesses said it musta been deliberate."  The detective looked at Alec and frowned.  "Those guys with the snake brands you told me about... one of them was spotted running away from the building just after the fire started.  Heard it on a police radio and decided to check it out just in case; that's how I happened across the little girl."

"Snake brands?  You think White knows about..."

"Max," Alec snapped without looking at her, "not now."  He gestured for the detective to continue.

"So when I was waving those papers you gave me around trying to convince the nurse to let me take her, the little one here took sight of your picture on the copy of your license and said you were her daddy.  Said she wanted to go home, now."  He chuckled.  "Not sure if the nurse believed her or she was just so surprised she let us go before she thought about it."

"Mm mm mm."  Original Cindy shook her head in amazement.  "Child ain't hardly old enough to eat jam and already she be talking her way out of one.  Now that is for sure what they call heredity."

"Yeah, she's a chip off the old block, all right," Normal agreed with relish.  He clapped Alec on the back as he added, "She's gonna be a beauty too, my friend; I can tell.  Better start loading up that shotgun now."  Suddenly he recalled the last time Alec and his friends had been at Jam Pony and his smile faltered.  "On second thought..."

"She is beautiful, Alec," Logan said softly.

And she was; Alec couldn't argue that point even if he'd still been able to form full sentences.  Instead he tentatively reached out and put his hands on either side of his daughter's waist.  When she didn't resist, he pulled her closer and stood up, gingerly holding her in his arms as though afraid she would either break or break down.

She did neither.  She wound her arms around his neck and burrowed into his shoulder, just as she had the first time he held her.  Alec felt something tighten in his chest at the simple gesture of affection and trust.  It was a gift he'd only received from one other person, now forever lost to him, and he promised again that this experience would not end like that one had.  He would protect her and give her the life that she deserved, no matter what the cost.  He would be brave for her, as he had not been in the past, and he would never, ever let her down.

He would not screw this up, not again.

* * * * *

Alec had wanted to make a quick getaway, but Logan pointed out a flaw in his plan in the shape of his beloved motorcycle.  It was a great piece of machinery, but child-safe it was not.  So instead he had to trust it to Max, and return to Terminal City in what he liked to call the Yawn Mobile.  There was still no car seat available, but it beat telling a toddler to close her eyes and hang on.

Logan was quiet at first, sneaking peeks at Alec and the little girl out of the corner of his eye when he thought the X5 wasn't watching.  After the third such stolen glance however, it became apparent his interest had not gone unnoticed.

"Her name's not Medusa, Logan," Alec drawled.  "You can actually look at her without turning to stone.  Just..." he waved a hand at the windshield, "don't look for too long, you know?  Eyes on the road, Eyes Only."

"So what _is_ her name?" Logan asked quietly.

The child turned her head towards Logan and smiled politely.  "49614."

"Excuse me?"  Logan had assumed that Alec would answer the question, and he didn't find the X5's attempt at a childish treble particularly amusing.  When he realized the answer had actually come from the child, he was embarrassed as well as unpleasantly surprised.  "You never gave her a real name?"

Alec looked down at the little girl sitting docilely on his lap.  He knew the guy didn't mean it, but once again all it took was a few quick words from Logan to make him feel like a first-class jerk.

"What good would it have done?" he countered, swallowing his irrational anger that the same people who labeled him with a number in place of a name had done it to his kid as well.  "They were going to call her what they wanted, no matter what I said."

"You're right, of course."  Logan flushed a dull red.  Even if Alec had called her something in the back of his mind, it was doubtful that he would be the first person the transgenic would share it with.  "I'm just... surprised.  It seems, well, it seems a little long.  Don't the rest of you usually go by a 3-digit... nickname."

"She wasn't assigned a number; it just came out of the combined DNA coding.  Genetics was never my specialty," he shrugged, "but I guess in a way it makes sense.  Her, well, her mother's number was 416."  Alec frowned.  "I think."

Logan's attention quickly shifted back to the road.  "Nice, Alec, very nice.  Be sure to say it just that way in front of Max.  After that... I'd try ducking."

"Hey, I'm sorry," the X5 protested.  "I only met her the one time, and even then I didn't see her face until after we..." he glanced down at his daughter, curled up like a cherub in his lap, "you know."

Logan tried to keep the distaste from showing on his face, but it was a struggle.  "Alec, maybe we should save this part for later," he suggested.  "Or, and here's a real possibility, never."

"Get your mind out of the gutter, Logan; it's not what you think."  Alec waved his hand as though to sweep the air clean of any tawdry implications.  "It was just the drugs.  Mostly the drugs," he qualified after a momentary pause to reevaluate.

"Strangely enough, that doesn't make it sound much better."

"I was a little... let's just say fuzzy... at the time."  He wished he knew why he felt the urge to explain himself to Logan, of all people; it wasn't like he cared what the guy thought of him.  "Manticore felt I needed some... retraining after one of my missions went seriously sideways.  And their idea of behavior modification involved a little more than cheese and buzzers."  

"Behavior modification?" Logan asked uneasily.  Having talked with some of Max's brothers and sisters over the past 2 years, he was pretty sure he knew where the transgenic was going with this; he just hadn't known it had happened to Alec.

"They called it re-indoctrination, but I like to think of it as freshening the genetic cocktail."  Pictures started flashing at the edges of Alec's memory; places and events he had no wish to revisit.  "Blend some super-size hallucinogens with a little brainwashing, top it off with some time on the rocks with the 'nomalies and stir until shaken."

He broke off and smiled down at the sleepy child in his lap, but there was more than a trace of bitterness in the hazel eyes that watched her struggle against the soothing rhythm of the moving car.  

"I was livin' large, you know?" he finished quietly.  "I mean it was a good day if I remembered my own number, let alone anyone else's."

Logan was silent, processing what Alec had said and wondering what he hadn't.  The X5 normally hid so much behind a smiling face and busy chatter; this much sharing had to mean what was still under wraps was much worse than usual.

"Does Max know?" he finally asked.

It took Alec a moment to pull himself back from the past and realize what Logan was referring to.  "About the time I spent in Psi Ops, or how I spent it?"

"Both."

"She only knows about the first time."  He saw the question forming in Logan's eyes and answered it before it was born.  "I was there for 'evaluation' as a kid because my twin Ben was one of her over the wall gang."

"Which one was... oh wait," Logan interrupted himself as the memory resurfaced.  "Now I, uh, remember Ben."

"Must have been from hearsay instead of personal experience, since you still seem to have all your teeth.  Not to mention a pulse."  Alec quirked a small smile at his sibling's psychotic tendencies and then continued, "Anyway, she knows I was there then, but not later.  I figured it might make me look bad.  You know... crazy."  He waved his finger in a circle next to his ear and shrugged.  "Something like that."

"I'm..." Logan flailed about for an adequate word, but could only come up with, "sorry."  

"Anyhow, I don't even... I mean I can't make myself see what she... 416... really looked like."  Alec pressed his knuckle hard against his forehead and rubbed, trying to force the memory to take shape.  "She was part of the 'treatment'; part of Psi Ops.  Like Mia."

Logan didn't want to smile when Mia's name came up, but he couldn't help it.  The bubbly transgenic had caused a lot of problems for all of them a few months ago, but she'd had such good intentions it was hard to stay mad at her.  There was also the possibility that she had rearranged the parts of their memories that would give them reason to be mad... but Logan preferred not to examine that idea too closely.

"If she was like Mia, I can see a memory problem happening very easily."  

"Nah, she wasn't really much like Mia.  I mean Mia's specialty was tele-coercion, and making people forget she was ever tiptoeing through their brain cells.  But 416 could make people see her, literally see her, as someone else."  Alec's hand fell away from his face, leaving him feeling oddly exposed.  Or maybe it was just the conversation that made him feel like he'd gone to work wearing nothing but his barcode.  "So even though they remembered her, no two people remembered her the same way."

"Sounds useful for intelligence gathering – the kind of disguise that never falls off or falls apart.  And you carry it with you everywhere."

"Exactly."  Alec looked down at the golden head resting against his chest and wished with all his heart that he could see some trace of a resemblance between child and mother.  But the memory just wasn't there.  "I don't remember what she looked like because to me she was someone else."

Logan risked a sidelong glance, despite the increase in foot traffic as they neared Terminal City.  "Someone you cared about?"

"You could say that," Alex answered brusquely.  

He was pretty sure that Max had told Logan what she knew, and what she'd imagined, about his relationship with Rachel Berrisford.  The girl was simply incapable of keeping a secret, especially from her boyfriend.  Logan had never called him on it, though; never asked any questions or made any buddy-buddy overtures because of it, and for that Alec was grateful.  Given the choice, he would prefer to maintain the status quo on that score.

"Did she... the mother, I mean... did she know how you saw her?"

Alec shifted his blank gaze to the side window, staring unseeingly at the city streets flashing past.  "I was supposed to see her as every girl I'd ever thought twice about; that was the whole plan.  But all I saw was... doesn't matter."  He cleared his throat and forced himself to turn back to Logan.  "She said she'd never tell, so I'm guessing she knew.  She must have kept her word, though, because they put me back in the field a couple of days later.  I didn't come back to that Manticore base for over a year."

"And by then you were a father."

"Yeah."  Alec laughed sharply.  "Or as Renfro put it, I screwed up but since she was born with a barcode," without thinking Alec's fingers brushed the back of his daughter's neck, "they were going to let it slide this time.  She had potential, even if mine was in doubt."

Logan had heard Max's stories of Renfro, and shared her antipathy for the former Manticore director.  He'd rarely heard Alec complain, however, or even make mention of his time there unless someone forced the issue.  For all that Alec was saying now, Logan was willing to bet there was a myriad of conflicting emotions and memories rumbling just beneath the X5's quiet surface that would never see the light of day.

"Ah, Renfro was a generous woman, wasn't she?"  Logan felt like an idiot, not for the first time that day, but he just didn't know what to say.  "I'm sure the lack of celebratory cigars was just an oversight.  A casualty of the gender gap, perhaps."

"Yeah, she was a real princess all right," Alec muttered.  "I think telling me was the last part of the test, because she sure didn't tell anyone else, not even Lydecker."

"Is that when you first saw her?"  Logan nodded at the child in Alec's lap.  "When you talked to Renfro?"

Alec felt a dull flush spreading its way across his face.  In retrospect his clandestine visit seemed a shade melodramatic, especially to be discussing with another guy.

"No, I, uh, snuck in to visit her one night," he explained awkwardly.  "They wouldn't have let me... they're not real up with the nuclear family at Manticore.  You understand.  But I wanted to see... and so I slipped in during a shift change."

Logan hadn't wasted much of the past year feeling sorry for Alec; the transgenic seemed like one of those undentable cars, or a ball that always popped back into shape after you squashed it.  No matter what happened, no matter how serious, Alec could always snap back, and he usually started Max snapping too.

But now, and most unwillingly, Logan's mind painted him a picture to flesh out Alec's story, and he felt a tug of sympathy for that young man of the past who had found himself pushed from one uncontrollable situation to the next.  Apparently Alec had learned to start pushing back, and at some of the most unexpected times.

"Obviously she saw you that night as well," he mused.  "Although... no offense... I don't understand why she would still remember.  You must have seen her more than that."

He hadn't intended it as a question, but Alec answered anyway.  

"It wasn't an easy place to get into, and I really, really didn't want to get on Renfro's bad side."  He didn't mention what she would have done to him and the child if she'd found out.  If Logan couldn't work it out for himself by now he didn't deserve to know.  "Besides, it wasn't too long after that Max and her buddies took out the DNA lab and Renfro had her moved to another facility.  I didn't know where she was."

He was trying to sound matter-of-fact, guy-to-guy, but Logan heard something raw beneath his light tones.  He wondered if Alec had known for sure his daughter survived the destruction of Manticore, or if he'd only hoped.

"So you've been looking for her since Manticore went down?"

Much to his surprise, Alec heard approval in Logan's voice, but he shrugged it off.  He hadn't done anything special, and what he had done had taken way too long.

"Well, not me personally.  Figured I'd set off too many flares that way.  But if you're willing to lay out enough cold hard cash you can find people who'll look for the needle after the haystack's gone into the cow and out the other side."  Without conscious thought, his arms tightened around the sleeping child in his lap.  "Once I realized that the government had gotten in on the trannie-killing fun, I found the money and they found her.  Eventually."

Another puzzle was marked as solved in Logan's brain; in odd moments he'd often found himself wondering how Alec spent the money he seemed to be gathering hand over fist.  Between the con jobs, the pool hustling, his brief but lucrative career as a fighter, and the cat burglary that Logan was fairly sure hadn't ended when Alec told Max it did, the X5 should have been rolling in money.  Yet the only things he ever spent it on were his bike, strippers and scotch.  And surely even Alec must have limits when it came to scotch.

"But wait, if you only saw her that one time... how old was she?"

_And again with the slam that wasn't supposed to be one._  Alec figured it was time he just gave it up; he was never going one of the Logan Cale's of the world.  His first impulse usually wasn't to do 'the right thing;' he thought the world owed him a little something in return if he was going to risk his ass to save it.  And he didn't know his own kid's birthday.

"Three months, maybe," he answered reluctantly.  "I don't know exactly when she was born.  Heck, I don't know when I was born.  But I can count to 10."

As often as Logan had seen Max, Alec and the other transgenics in action, their genetically enhanced abilities never failed to impress him.  "Three months?  She's got some memory."

Alec's blush deepened as he experienced the new sensation of parental pride.  "I guess she does."

"Must take after her mother.  Your memory's only good when it comes to money."

Logan had only intended to tease Alec, the way he had often joked with friends about the supposedly extraordinary exploits of their respective children.  But the joke fell flat when Alec was once again reminded of his child's mother, and the bitter circumstances leading to their pairing.

"Maybe she does take after her mother," the transgenic answered quietly.  "I wouldn't know.  Or don't you remember that?"

Logan cleared his throat and tried to think of a graceful out.  Unfortunately time was running short before they reached Terminal City and there were still a few things he needed to know.  Or rather, things Max needed to know but someone less volatile than she needed to ask.

"Speaking of her mother, do you know where she is now?  Can we expect a visit from her too?"

Alec opened his mouth to answer, but this time he paused to consider his words before committing himself.  He didn't know if the child knew the word 'dead,' or what it meant, but he didn't want to take any chances of upsetting her.  She'd been through enough already.

"She was a soldier first, last and always," he said carefully.  "So no, we won't be seeing her anywhere outside of a séance."

"Oh.  I'm sorry."

"Me too.  I guess."

"So it's just you and..."  Logan paused and gritted his teeth.  He was not going to call a small child by a number, even if that was what she was used to.  It was inhuman.  "You're going to have to give her a name, Alec."

Alec wouldn't look at him, and he couldn't look at her.  Instead he stared straight out the front windshield as he answered, "No, I don't."

"We can't keep calling her by a number," Logan protested.

"I know."

"So you're going to let her choose her own name?"  Logan was getting more confused by the minute.  He had a feeling Alec was stonewalling, but he didn't know why.  "Isn't she a little young for that?"

Alec steeled himself to meet Logan's curious blue eyes.  "Naming is something a parent should do," he said carefully.  

"But you're her father.  Like it or not, you're..."

"Not somebody who should be raising a kid."   Before the stunned Logan could think of any response, Alec quietly added, "But maybe with your help I can find someone else who can swing it."

* * * * *

Max paced anxiously, quickly covering the width of the old factory and back again as she tried to work off the nervous energy produced by all this unfamiliar waiting.  She'd known she would get back to Terminal City before Alec and Logan – Logan wasn't exactly noted for his high-speed driving unless the cops were riding up his tailpipe.  But having the little stranger in the car was obviously making him drive like somebody's grandmother because he should have been back at least... she checked her watch... 8 minutes ago.

"Max wearing new shoes?" a deep voice rumbled quietly behind her.  "Must break feet in?"

She spun on the heel of her nowhere near new boot and reluctantly smiled at the man behind her.

"No new shoes, Joshua; just the same old Alec."

He cocked his head to the side, his brow furrowing with concern.  Cat DNA aside, Max had been like a sister to Joshua from the moment they met, babying him half the time and looking to lean on him the other half.  He loved her, just like he had loved his brother Isaac.  But Alec was his friend; the first one he'd ever had among the 'upstairs people.'  In some ways that made them closer than brothers.  And now it seemed his friend was in trouble, at least with Max.

"Alec do something bad, make Max angry?" he asked worriedly.

"Not angry exactly," she hedged.  Actually 'angry' pretty much summed it up, but Logan had made her feel funny about admitting it.  "It's just..." she shrugged helplessly, "I thought I could finally trust him.  I mean I know he's still pretty much Mr. Unreliable, but I thought he was straight up, at least with me."

Joshua reached out and gently tugged on a lock of Max's long dark hair, hoping to tease her out of her dark mood now that he was reassured it was nothing out of the ordinary.  "Alec have secret," he corrected himself.  "Make Max angry."

"Doesn't it make you mad?" she asked, staring up at him plaintively.  "I mean you guys seem tight, but I don't think he told anyone this."

"Tell Joshua what?"

She hesitated, debating whether or not she should let Alec be the one to tell him.  It was, after all, his big news.  But as soon as he hit Terminal City with a toddler in tow the cat DNA would be out of the bag; maybe it would be better to prepare Joshua beforehand.

"He has a kid; a little girl."  She threw her hands up in the air.  "She's like a year-and-a-half old or something, and he never even told me she existed.  Did he tell you?"

"Alec have little girl?  Alec father?"  Joshua wrestled with the idea for a minute and then smiled broadly.  As hard as it seemed to be for Max to picture Alec as a father, to Joshua it wasn't so far fetched.

"So you didn't know either."  Max scuffed the floor with the toe of her boot, watching the rising dust beneath it with a sour expression.  "I'm not sure if that makes me feel better or worse."

Joshua slid a consoling arm around her slender shoulders and squeezed her tight against him.  "Alec have many secrets, many surprises," he rumbled.  "So many surprises Joshua not surprised anymore."

"I suppose that's one way to look at it," she grumbled.  "But I like my way better – he lied to me.  To all of us."

Joshua ached for the hurt he heard in his Little Fella's voice, and he struggled to find a way to ease it.  "Joshua... have brother Isaac when he was small.  Max have litter of brothers and sisters."

She couldn't help the small smile that tugged at her lips over Joshua's description of her chosen family.

"Alec have... Alec," he continued, with an expressive shrug of his broad shoulders.  "Alec trust Alec."

"But he's not alone now," she insisted.  Joshua's argument was beginning to make sense, but she still wanted to be mad at Alec when he got back to Terminal City; he owed her that much.  "I've saved his ass enough for him to realize that.  At least he should have."

"Like Joshua tell Max about Isaac?" he asked gently.  He didn't want to reopen old wounds, his or hers, but he needed her to understand.  More importantly, Alec was going to need her to understand.  "Joshua protect Isaac, even from Little Fella.  Isaac need help more than Max need to know Isaac need help."

Max opened her mouth to protest, but she was forestalled by the chirping of her cell phone.  She pulled it out of her pocket and stared at it in surprise for a moment before she flipped it open. 

"Go for Max," she said crisply.

* * * * *

Although much of the media coverage has dissipated in the weeks since the siege at Terminal City ended, there were always at least one or two tabloid journalists hanging around the gates in the hopes of an interview with, or about, the transgenics.  Alec's flight on his motorcycle, followed quickly by Max and Logan in Logan's car, had not gone unnoticed by the day's stringers.  By the time Logan's car approached the south gate for the second time that day, a small crowd had gathered and the cameramen were setting up lights.

"I was afraid of this," Logan said grimly.  "Every move Max makes these days is news.  They were bound to be interested when she went storming out after you."

Alec glanced down at his daughter, and then out at the flashing lights that awaited them.  "I was kind of hoping to hold off on her television debut until she could keep from drooling on the camera.  It kind of gives the wrong impression of transgenics."  

Logan wrenched the steering wheel to the right and brought the car to a quick stop in a small alley.  "What do you want to do?  We can try to storm our way past, and hope they don't see her, but there's no guarantee that will work."

"I'd feel better if she was somewhere White can't get to her," Alec confided reluctantly.  "Terminal City has those really handy biotoxins in the air going for it, even if it is a little crowded around the edges right now."

"We could wait," Logan suggested.  "Go over to Joshua's house until dark.  They might get bored by then if nothing's going on."

It might also give he and Max a chance to sound Alec out on this adoption idea and see if the transgenic really knew what he was saying.  Alec might have the right idea, but then again he might just be scared, as anyone else would be.  Before Logan helped him make any irrevocable decisions, he had to know Alec was sure.

"And by Joshua's house you mean Sandeman's old house... where Ames White might have lived when he was as tall as she is now."

"I hadn't thought of it that way."  Logan grimaced, as much at the unpleasantness of the idea as the fact that Alec had thought of it first.  The X5's normally relaxed attitude tended to blind most people, not just Logan, to his intelligence, sometimes to their great cost.

"Still," Alec sighed, "he never did find the big guy when he was living there, so maybe that's the best choice after all.  But Max is going to pissed that we bailed on her," he warned Logan.

"If she hasn't made it too far inside yet..." Logan quickly dug into his pocket for his cell phone and hit the first button on his speed dial.  "Come on, come on," he muttered.  "Ah, wait... Max?  It's Logan."

"And chopped liver," Alec called out in the direction of the phone.  "Don't forget me."

"Yeah, same old same old," Logan agreed with her a moment later.  "Hey, we're going to hide from the reporters at the gate until after dark... I said 'hide," he repeated a minute later.  "At Joshua's.  Why don't you come over?"

"Don't let them follow you!"  This time Alec was all business.

Logan clicked the phone off and slipped it back into his pocket.  "The line went dead," he explained.  "Must be the jamming.  But she got the gist of it, so I think we're off the hook."

"You mean you are," Alec grimly corrected him.  "My neck hasn't even begun to stretch yet."

* * * * *

"Sir, we just had a report from one of our operatives.  Stage 2 has begun."

Ames White looked up at his underling standing in the doorway, searching for signs that Otto might be shining him on in the name of job, or personal, security.  Seeing nothing but the usual nervous sincerity, White pushed the pile of boring, unnecessary and apparently never-ending paperwork off to the side of his desk.  

"You're sure?  494 has the girl right now?"

"Yes sir."  Otto took a step inside the office and closed the door behind him, but he made no attempt to encroach further on White's territory.  "He picked her up at that messenger place about 30 minutes ago.  But he, uh," here was where things got a bit less encouraging, "he didn't take her back to Terminal City.  Sir."

White stood up quickly, and Otto had to force himself not to back up.  His boss had undergone some changes over the past few months, and what once had been a normal desire to be a good agent has transformed into a grim determination to do his job at all costs, even if the cost was his job.

Or someone else's life; that one didn't seem to be causing too many worry lines either, if Otto was any judge.

"Is the implant in place?" White asked urgently.  

"Yes sir," Otto answered in relief.  This time he did approach the desk, going to the far side and typing a few commands on White's keyboard.  A map appeared, the grids indicating city streets, and on one of the lines there was a blinking red light.

"She's right there, sir."  Otto pointed, unnecessarily in White's opinion, to the blinking light.  Then he typed in another command and a small box popped up on the bottom of the screen.  "Here's the address.  It's in a rundown section of town not far from Terminal City.  I guess they're going to lay low there for a little while before they head in to base camp."

White looked at the address and then did a doubletake.  _It figured; it really did.  _They were going to his father's old house, the one he bought when he left the fellowship.  White had, of course, never lived there; he hadn't even seen his father after the Conclave sanctioned him for saving CJ from the initiation.  But he knew about the house anyway, as he knew every move his father had made until he left Manticore.  Somehow the old man managed to drop off the radar then, but seeing that 494 was seeking refuge there made him wonder if this was one more thing he needed to question his transgenic prey about.

"Sir?  Is something wrong?"

Otto had noticed White's absorption, but fortunately he had no idea of the source.  Fortunately for White, and more so for Otto.

"Wrong?"  White brought himself back to the present with difficulty.  "No, Otto; nothing's wrong.  So he's got the child.  Good, well then we'll just let them settle in for a few days before we begin Stage 3."

"Yes sir."  Otto shifted his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other.  "About Stage 3, sir..."

White's penetrating gaze switched from the computer screen to his nervous assistant.  "What about it?"

"Well... what is it?  Sir."  Otto considered pausing to give his boss a chance to answer, but the look in White's eyes told him he'd last longer if he made the question sound a little better first.  "If we're beginning it in a few days, it might be best to prepare the team," he suggested.

"Do you think our team is unable to handle any situation the transgenics might throw at us?"  

White's voice was dangerously calm.  It wasn't that he was really all that angry about the question being posed; frankly he'd been wondering when Otto would get up the guts to ask it.  But he did love to watch his assistant squirm.

"No sir!"  Otto seemed shocked by the suggestion, although on him it wore the same way as fear.  "Sir, it's just... we had the child, or as good as.  We knew where she was.  Why didn't we just take her into custody?  Why let the transgenic have her?"

"Why, why, why," White mocked.  "You worry too much, Otto.  _Why_ do you do that?"  He clapped Otto on the back, and tried not to smile too broadly when he felt the man flinch.  "I have a plan... no, we have a plan.  And it's a good one.  Trust me, when you find out the details, you're going to thank me."

Otto could feel his supervisor's hand pushing him none too subtly towards the door.  Obviously White had said all he was going to say for the moment, and making an issue of it would only create more problems.

Problems for Otto, that is.

"Yes sir," he said miserably as he pulled open the door and stepped out.  "Thank you sir."

White was smiling as he closed the door behind his assistant. Otto probably had a lower IQ than the cocker spaniel his father used to create Dog Boy, but the man was definitely polite.  It was an attitude that could get him killed in a job like theirs.

And if Otto was lucky, that was the worst that would happen.

* * * * *

To Be Continued 


	2. Chapter 2

In the Shadows

Part 2

By Gem

From the dark look on Max's face when she walked into Joshua's house, Logan knew they were all in for a rough time.  She had been hurt by the idea of Alec keeping the secret of a child from her, but to be confronted with the reality of it, especially on what she once considered her turf, had to be that much more painful.  The closest thing to a positive mood indicator Logan could find was that she refrained from slamming the door, and while it was probably only in deference to the new arrival in the family, he was desperate enough to take it as a good sign.

"You made good time."  He rose from his computer desk and crossed the room to greet her, pretending a heartiness that felt as foreign as it looked_.  How did he end up running interference for Alec, of all people?_  "I'm guessing the reporters didn't give you any trouble?"

She dismissed the paparazzi with a snort as she stalked past him into the living room.  "They were easy enough to ditch at the gates."

"Fine."  He beamed, and tried to look like he meant it.  "That's very..."

"You can't protect him forever, Logan," she interrupted him.  "I'm not real clear on why you'd want to."  She switched her accusatory gaze to her wayward fellow transgenic.  "Okay, Alec, this had better be good."

Alec looked up from the floor where he was sitting next to his daughter, watching her draw on Logan's white board.  The board had been laid on the floor, and she had been carefully placed in the middle of it, after her attempts to color the floor with Logan's markers proved detrimental to the markers.  Fortunately the floor's condition was a moot point after all these years of neglect.

"Max, what about this situation is not good?"  A quick frown chased across the X5's normally cheerful face.  "Did something happen to my bike?"

She raised her eyebrows and began tapping her foot impatiently against the wood floor, but she still kept her voice low to avoid scaring 49614.  "The bike is fine, Alec; I drive it better than you do."

"Since when?" he protested, but she could see his heart wasn't in it.

"As far as the not part of good, let's start with Ames White sending his buddies to burn down orphanages and work our way up."  

"Do you mind?" he asked, inclining his head towards his small but apparently bright child.  "We can talk about White and the f-i-r-e later."

Logan jumped in before Max could respond.  "It can wait, but we do have to talk about it.  We need to figure out who the target or targets were."

Alec stared at Logan, and then at the array of computer equipment in front of him.  "I thought that's what you've been working on for the past half-hour.  You telling me you've been playing Solitaire instead?"

"I need more information, Alec."

"I second that."  Max raised her hand in the air and waved it slightly for attention.  "If we can't talk about the f-i-r-e, then how about the part where you have a kid you never told me about?  Never told any of us about."  She perched on the edge of an armchair.  "That an easier jumping off point?"

"It was complicated," Alec answered quietly.  "And I told you once before that you had to be there to understand."

"Manticore?  Guess what; I was there.  And I remember the breeding program, okay?"  She grimaced, though there were traces of affection in her voice when she continued, "Trust me, I remember it vividly."

Alec appreciated the fact that she could smile about their past now, but his own past was dogging him and dragging him back to where he didn't want to go.

"That's not how it... she... happened.  In fact," he leaned over and gently tugged at a loose golden curl as 49614 smiled up at him, "she's how the program got started."

"Say again?"

"She's the first..." he began, before a voice from the hall interrupted him.

"First?"

"You brought Joshua," Alec said in a low voice as he rolled his eyes at her.  "Of course you did.  Because you speeding off on your motorcycle alone wouldn't attract nearly as many reporters."  

"He was worried about you," she hissed.

"Well whose fault was that?" Alec hissed back.  He waved to the tall dog-man hovering in the doorway and raised his voice.  "Come on in, buddy."

Joshua shambled into the room slowly, his eyes fixed on the little girl playing with his paints.  She seemed oblivious to him at first, but as he moved closer she looked up, and then scooted back against Alec in alarm.

"Hey, it's okay."  Alec leaned over her and wrapped his arms around her small, shaking form, pulling her over onto his lap.  "Joshua's a friend.  He would never hurt you; do you understand?  He's one of us."

"First," Joshua said softly.  He patted his chest as he squatted down in front of the child.  "Joshua first too."

"That's right," Alec said.  "Joshua is the first transgenic, and you're the first... multiple transgenic?  Transgenic once removed?"

"Second generation transgenic," Logan suggested absently, his attention once more caught by a story on recent fires he'd pulled up on his computer.

"But she's not the first," Max jumped in.  "Tinga's little boy, Case, is a couple of years older than she must be."

"Yeah, but it took a few years before he showed any signs of her enhanced DNA," Alec explained.  "And he doesn't have a barcode, lucky kid."  A moment later he realized 49614 might take his comment the wrong way and hastened to reassure her, "Not that a barcode is bad, monkey.  We all have them.  Well not Joshua, and not..."

Max leaned over and waved her hand in front of his face.  "Earth to Alec.  How would you know about Case's non-existent barcode?"

"I... might have done a little snooping in Renfro's files."  A hint of his usual cocky smile darted across Alec's lips at the memory.  It hadn't netted him any information on his daughter's whereabouts, but it had bought a little of his self-respect back.  "And according to what I read, he's half plain old human... sorry, Logan."

Logan waved away his apology.  "I'm used to it," he said with a wry smile.

"But I don't understand why she has a barcode," Max said with a puzzled frown.  "I mean maybe Tinga's husband explains about Case, but Gem's little girl Regan doesn't have one either and her father is an X5."

Alec shrugged; medical mysteries weren't really his style.  "Well my kid does.  And even though she was an..." he started to say 'accident,' but then thought better of it.  "She was a surprise," he finally settled on, "but Renfro decided she had potential.  She was the first product of two X5's who immediately showed signs of transgenic breeding.  Then when you had your little temper tantrum in the DNA lab," he raised an eyebrow at Max, "she went from an anomaly to the new solution.  The new wave in genetic research... inherited manipulated DNA."

"Sounds like she's going to be quite a handful as she grows up."  Logan's smile radiated innocence; as far as Max and Joshua could tell he was just making an effort to rejoin the conversation.  "She'll need people around her who really understand who she is and what she needs."

Alec's back stiffened as he pulled away from his daughter and sat up.  He knew exactly where Logan was going with his oblique comments, and he didn't appreciate it.

"Never had parents myself," the X5 drawled, "so I can't say for sure.  But I thought that sort of thing was pretty common.  Doesn't every kid go through a stage when they feel like an alien?"

"And then there's the lucky ones who find out they really are one."  Max squatted down in front of the soon-to-be newest resident of Terminal City and ran her finger down the child's warm, soft cheek.  "Welcome to the wonderful world of Freaks 'R' Us, baby."

"She's not a freak," Alec said sharply.

Max raised her hands in surrender; she was startled by Alec's defensive tone, but oddly touched by it as well.  "Hey, it's just the pot calling the kettle a genetically engineered cooking utensil.  We are what we are, Alec; that's what Terminal City is all about."

"I know," he conceded quickly, "it's just..."

"I'm sure it's just a sensitive subject," Logan finished for him.    "I don't think Alec wanted to pass on some of the... burdens... of your genetic make-up, that's all."

"Say, how did you get to the point where you were passing on anything?" Max asked curiously.  "They didn't exactly encourage that at Manticore, unless you were part of the breeding program."

Alec cast a panicked look down at his wide-eyed child.  She seemed to be listening with great interest, and a frightening intelligence.  He had a sudden sinking conviction that she had understood every word spoken thus far, and all of it would add up to one massive therapy bill in later years.

"Max, this really isn't the right..."

"Hungry," 49614 announced suddenly.  "Want eat."

In an instant her father had swept her up into his arms and gotten to his feet.

"She's hungry," he said with relief.  "I'm going to go in the kitchen and find her something to eat that doesn't require cooking."  He looked down at the little girl as he explained, "Cooking isn't really my style.  And if that's hereditary... uh, sorry."

"Little hot dogs," Joshua suggested helpfully.  "Joshua have many cans of them when he lives here."

"And I haven't touched them," Logan assured Alec.  "I wouldn't."  He saw the wounded expression on Joshua's face a second too late, prompting him to add, "Because to me little hot dogs are a party food, and since this is the first party I've had here... break out those dogs."

* * * * *

Joshua trailed after Alec into the kitchen, as Alec's daughter watched him warily over her father's shoulder.  Logan used the time alone with Max to fill her in on what he had learned so far from Alec, minus the revelation that the X5 did not plan on keeping his long-lost daughter.  That would be Alec's job to explain.  What he did say added up to a whole lot of nothing as far as Max was concerned, but despite her opinion that Logan's story lacked sufficient detail, he had barely finished speaking when Alec walked back into the living room.

"So where's your entourage?"  Max glanced over his shoulder, but Alec was alone.

"She's decided she likes Joshua."  Alec nodded at the smeared white board on the floor.  "Maybe Sandeman spread that artistic DNA around.  I think they're redesigning the label for those little hot dogs even as we speak."  

"Yeah, you know speaking is what we need to be doing," Max said quickly.  "Alec..."

She was too late.  Alec's attention was already drifting back towards his child as an unfamiliar sensation overcame him:  worry.    He scratched the back of his neck and looked anxiously down the hallway leading to the kitchen.  "Say, does, uh, anybody know how many of those hot dog things a little kid can eat?  I mean how many should they eat?"

"You actually let her eat them?"  Logan rose from his computer desk in alarm and started towards the kitchen.  

"Logan, wait."  Max slipped into his path, holding her arms out to block his exit.  "We're talking transgenic stomachs here.  She could probably eat the can and be okay."

Logan relaxed immediately, but Alec had a harder time letting go of his anxiety.  His embarrassment over his anxiety wasn't any picnic to shake either. 

"Okay, okay; so I don't know too much about kids," he said defensively.  

"Just enough to be dangerous," Max muttered.

Alec heard the tone, and he knew he was in for it.  There was no room for escape this time; he might as well surrender to the inevitable.

"All right, Max, hit me."  He flung his arms wide and strode into the center of the living room.  "Give it your best shot.  Both barrels.  Wide open."

Max watched him silently, which both Alec and Logan found disturbing.

"Come on, Maxie," Alec coaxed, "you can do it."  He wiggled his fingers in the direction of his exposed chest.  "Let 'er rip.  Figuratively speaking, of course."

She still said nothing.

"Maxie?"  Alec frowned and abruptly dropped his hands to his sides.  "Well now you're just creeping me out," he said flatly.  

"Why didn't you tell me?" 

"Ouch."  He winced at her calm, reasonable tone.  Angry Max was a known quantity, but Hurt Max required a whole different set of operating instructions.  "I think I would've made out better with the fists."

"This isn't a joke, Alec.  I thought we were, well, friends.  Something like that anyway."

Now he was scared; this wasn't the way it was supposed to go down.  "We are," he said intently.  "We are friends, Max."

She wasn't buying his earnest act any more than she'd ever fallen for his charm.  "Friends don't keep these kind of secrets from each other."

"Oh, so you're telling me you were straight up with Original Cindy about your designer DNA from Day 1?"  He didn't give her a chance to answer before he charged forward.  "I know Sketchy didn't know until the hostage situation; does that mean he's not your friend?"

"It's not the same," she insisted.  "I would have been trusting them with my life."

"And I would have been trusting you with her life," he countered.  "Even though most of the time you seemed like you'd be happier if the nearest hover drone crash landed into my skull."

"Hey," Logan said quickly, "go easy, Alec.  It's been a big day for everybody and I think we're all a little stressed."

"Well maybe we wouldn't be so stressed if we'd known what was going on," Max said coolly.  "Maybe we could've even helped; did you ever think of that?" she challenged Alec.

On a normal day he would have had a quick comeback, probably one tailored to send her temper spiraling ever upwards.  Today Alec could only nod somberly as he threw himself into one of the armchairs.  

"Every damn day," he answered.  

She was taken aback by his admission that she was right; usually it required literal arm-twisting, and a few uppercuts, to get him to agree with her that the sky was blue.  Of course this being Seattle, a lot of the time he was onto something with the non-blue idea... but that had nothing to do with this situation, she reassured herself.

"Then why didn't you?  My god, Alec, why didn't you tell me the night Manticore burned down?  I had no idea there were babies in those buildings."

"They were in a separate facility adjacent to the compound."  His voice was as stony as his face, providing what he hoped was sufficient cover for the raw state of his true emotions.  "When I saw the barracks were on fire I went to check it out, but they'd cleaned the place out lock, stock and lollipop."  

"Makes sense," Logan said quietly.  "They were trying to say the Manticore facility was a VA hospital; how do you fit children into that scenario?"

"She was already gone anyway; she'd been gone for months."

"And you've been trying to find her, like I was trying to find my brothers and sisters."  Alec nodded stiffly, stoking her anger, though she was no longer sure who she was really mad at.  "But see I was smart.  Once I met Logan I... check out this concept... I asked for help."

"Max," Logan began, but she wasn't finished yet.

"You know the kind of contacts Logan has... you've always known.  He could've helped you find her ages ago."

Alec rubbed his aching forehead and gazed bleakly at Max through his fingers.  "Ages ago?  Would that be after I let you infect him with the retrovirus so I could get you both back to Manticore?  Or would after I used his virus cure money to pay for my personal bomb disposal have been a better time?"

Logan felt the need to protest, despite the fact that he could see where Alec was coming from.  "That was a long time ago.  After all that we three have been through together over the past year, I would hope you'd know you could come to me for help with something as major as this."

As soon as the words left his mouth, Logan wished them back.  Alec had asked his help with something every bit as important, and even though they hadn't spoken of it since he was pretty sure Alec already knew there was nothing less he wanted to do.  

"Logan, I know you would've helped me.  You're a stand-up guy."  Feeling he owed Logan a full explanation as thanks for all the help he had provided this day, Alec expounded on his praise, although every word mocked him with what he lacked in comparison.  "In fact, you're Mr. Saves-the-World-on-a-Weekly-Basis.  And that's great.  But... people notice you doing the saving."

"That's not true," Logan objected.  "Eyes Only..."

"Is a really swell beard, I'll grant you.  People don't notice Logan Cale, mild-mannered reporter, when he says he's working on a story for Eyes Only.  But people, especially the bad guys, do remember where he was looking, and who he was doing it for."  

Alec gritted his teeth behind the mask of his bland smile.  Logan still looked a little put out, and Max wasn't buying a word of it.  Even praising Logan apparently fell flat of everyone's expectations; he just couldn't win.  But still he had to try to get through to the man.  

"They notice what Eyes Only is up to, and I couldn't risk that.  I needed to find her quietly, without setting off any signals that might have led the wrong people to her before me."

"Ames White," Logan said with a reluctant nod.  He didn't like the feeling that his actions could be so easily read by others, but he was beginning to see why Alec might think so.  He was also beginning to see why the transgenic might not think he was going to be a candidate for Father of the Year any time soon.

"You got it, brother.  Bad enough he was after Max's transgenic ass morning, noon and night; I didn't want to give him a new target whose only defense is spitting up.  It's not like she's a Gossamer or anything."

His explanation only touched off yet another sore spot for Max.  "How do you know she isn't?  It's not like you know more than half of what's in her."

Alec's jaw tightened as he glanced from Max to Logan.  "Now how did I know we were gonna have to hash that out too?" he muttered.  "Well, heck, it's not like it was private or anything."

"Alec..." Max's voice switched from sarcastic to plaintive as she sat on the battered sofa near his chair.  She was tired of fighting with him; she was tired of fighting period.  "I just want to understand.  I can't help if I don't, and I really do want to help."

"What's there to understand?  It happened, the drugs they were giving me didn't play nicely with birth control, and ten months later..."

She held up her hand to quiet him.  "That's not what I mean.  Logan said you only met her once, and you said this was before the breeding program kicked off, so what's the deal?  I know Manticore; they wouldn't have been looking to hook you up for the senior prom, so what..."

He didn't often let it get to him that she had escaped Manticore and he still seemed to carry it with him like a stain he could never get clean.  He knew she hadn't had an easy life on the outside either, and anyway it was done.  Over.

Except on days like today.

"You know Manticore?"  Alec's sharp laugh cut her off like a dash of cold water to the face.  "You don't know anything about Manticore, little girl.  How many times do I have to tell you that?"

She stood up abruptly and placed one hand on each hip as she glared down at him.  Apparently being nice and sympathetic was only going to get her more stonewalling at best, and maybe just a kick in the teeth.

"You know, I'm getting pretty sick of you playing the pity card because I had the guts to leave and you didn't."

"I didn't have a Zack and 10 other kids to provide a distraction," he snapped back.  "And after you left things got just a little... strict."    

"Okay, okay."  Logan quickly stepped between them, figuring neither of them was quite to the point of shedding his blood if they couldn't get to each other's.  "I don't really see how comparing battle scars is going to get us anywhere."

But Max was not in the mood to give in so easily, especially when Alec had yet to apologize for lying to her.  "I wasn't just there as a kid," she insisted.  "When I got caught last year and they tried to 'reeducate' me, that was..."

"That was nothing," Alec said flatly.  "You think they actually believed they could rehabilitate you after you spent half your life on the outside?"

"They did okay with Brin."  

He swallowed the angry protest that sprang to his lips; he knew Brin was a difficult subject for Max.  She had let Manticore take her "big sister" back to save her life, and then Brin had turned around and helped Renfro capture another one of their sisters.  Now Tinga was dead, and Brin was in Terminal City trying to live down her past.  It was a feeling he was only too familiar with, which is why he usually cut Max some extra slack.  

Usually.

"They got lucky with Brin," he countered.  "She was half dead when they started.  But you?  They made a token effort, just to keep the fear of God and Renfro in everyone, but they never expected it to take."

"And they thought you were so easy to housebreak?" she scoffed.  "Guess again."

"They didn't have a choice."   For a minute he sounded much more like Ben than happy-go-lucky Alec; so much so, in fact, that it scared her.  "I lived my whole life there, and then as soon as I got my first hall pass I went native on them.  They had to make me fit back into the groove or else the guys with the checkbooks would start thinking twice about funding."

"So they tortured you by throwing blondes at you?  Oh, poor baby."

Something dark flashed through Alec's hazel eyes; a pain he would never acknowledge, even if he released some of the accompanying anger.  He couldn't explain it to Max; the truth was he didn't want to.  He didn't want her to know how low he had sunk that night.  

Part of him had been fooled by his transgenic partner's guise, but another part of him just didn't want to admit that this wasn't Rachel with him, alone with him and saying all the things they never had a chance to say to each other.  It was the only night he'd ever made love to the girl he adored, and all the while a part of him had known he was actually aiding the plans of the people who helped him kill her.  

"They wanted to teach me that one woman is pretty much the same as the next, especially when it comes to sex."  Alec forced his voice to be calm; he leaned heavily on the lessons learned in those dark days in the Manticore dungeons.  "A little make-up, a little shape-shifting and you too can have all the spice of life with none of the commitment."

"You don't believe that," she said flatly.    

"Face it, Max; you don't know what I believe.  Right now you're thinking you never knew me at all."  He smiled at her then, the old Alec 'I'm always fine' smile that it took her so long to notice never reached his eyes.  "And I'm thinking that you're right."  

* * * * *

"All right, people, let's get organized here."  Mole waited a moment and then switched to what should have been a more familiar method of address.  "Attention!"

The majority of the small crowd continued to ignore Mole however, even after he tapped the butt of his gun on the makeshift podium.  He scowled at the few overly social transgenics in the back who couldn't seem to stop talking, and prepared to fire his weapon at the ceiling instead.  Luke's hand shot out just in time and pulled the gun down to point towards the floor once more.

"Yo!  Eyes front, pie holes closed, on the double!" Luke barked, but his tough guy Mole imitation was somewhat spoiled when he turned to his role model and anxiously asked, "Did I do it right?"

"Ditch diggers," Mole grumbled, chewing savagely on his cigar.  

"What's the occasion?" Brin asked quietly from her post near the door.  "Dix said it had something to do with Alec."

Mole eyed her warily.  She hadn't said much to anyone in the three weeks that she had been in Terminal City, and despite the fact that Max claimed her as "family," the only one Brin seemed to be at ease with was Alec.  That might have had something to do with her so-called little sister giving her at least a cool shoulder if not outright cold, but neither one of the women actually said enough about the other to make anyone certain of anything.  The only reason he'd sent Dix to get her at all was because Alec seemed to think she was okay.

"Unconfirmed rumors have now been confirmed: we have a new resident on her way to Terminal City," Mole answered at last, switching his attention to his small group of chosen listeners.  "Or she will be on her way after all these damn reporters clear out.  And since she only managed to get away from Manticore today, seems like we should do something to welcome her home."

Brin smiled slightly at the sight of gruff and grumpy Mole trying not to sound sentimental.  Alec swore there was a marshmallow somewhere underneath that tough lizard skin, but until today she'd thought he was just teasing.  The only problem was that something in his apparent hospitality didn't track.

"Manticore was dismantled almost a year ago," she pointed out.  "Who couldn't have gotten away from them in all that time?"

"Someone who couldn't walk, that's who," Luke jumped in to answer.  "Course she probably could after a little while, but even an X5 isn't born knowing how to escape and evade.  They just learn it faster than the rest of us."

The snorts and guffaws circulating the room made Brin a little uneasy, and not just because she seemed to be the only X5 in the room.  She was still trying to figure out her place here in Terminal City, and with every cool glance she received from Max she was made more aware of her status as an outcast among the outcasts.  Only Alec, who probably knew more about her recent Manticore activities than anyone, didn't seem to care what she'd been doing for the evil empire or since it fell; at least that's how it felt to her.

"Our new resident is... and this one you're not gonna believe, people."  Mole grinned around his stogie, relishing his moment in the spotlight.  "It's Alec's kid."

Mole had expected disbelief, and some out and out laughter, and he was not disappointed.  It was Brin's clear voice that cut through the confusion, however, and inadvertently stole his thunder.

"He found 49614?"

* * * * *

 "Should've known he'd be good at this," Max grumbled.  She stared out at the tiny backyard, as though the intensity of her gaze would somehow alter the annoying, and annoyingly cute, image that greeted her.  "He can't be more than 12 himself."

"That old?" Logan asked dubiously.  

Truthfully, he was getting a little tired of the subject of Alec and his new status as a parent, but it seemed to be the only thing on Max's mind.  And while Logan could have easily channeled his frustration into net searches, knowing he was helping at the same time, Max could only help by watching and worrying.  And by talking about how worrying it was to only be able to watch.

"Max, why don't you go out there," he suggested, as much for his benefit as hers.

"No," she sighed, "I think Alec is still kind of steamed at me.  Besides, they look like they're doing fine on their own."  Max turned away from the kitchen window and leaned against the sink.  "Where did he manage to find a ball in this house?"

"The basement, probably.  From the looks of it, I'd say we could find pretty much everything but Sandeman down there."

She crossed the small room and slid into the chair next to Logan, drumming her fingers on the table in a vain attempt to settle her restless nerves.  "They're playing ball with her... do you realize how weird that is?"

"So we're back to that again."  This time it was Logan's turn to sigh as he got to his feet and went in search of the coffee he'd bought last week.  He had a feeling this was going to be a very long day and he'd better refuel whenever he got the chance.  "What's so strange about playing ball?"

"Uh, because we don't know how," she snapped.  "You think they spent a lot of time at Manticore teaching us to play softball and hopscots..."

"Hopscotch," he corrected her with a smile.  "And no, I never thought Manticore's idea of gym class was anything like the Seattle public school system."

"Got that right," she said with a snort and a toss of her long, dark hair.  

"But anyone can figure out how to toss a ball to a toddler, Max, especially when you've got genetically enhanced reflexes on either end of the deal."  He reached up into the cupboard and fumbled around for a mug.  "I imagine the hard part is keeping Joshua from chasing it."

She made a face at him.  "He's gonna be great with her too, you wait and see.  Not even two years old and she's got her own private art instructor; I can already tell she's gonna love that.  Plus," she raised her index finger for emphasis, "can't you just picture the piggyback rides?  She'll think she's on Mt. Everest during an earthquake."

Logan stiffened as he withdrew the mug and carefully set it down on the counter.  "Max, you might want to wait on the plans until things are a little more settled."

"I'm not making plans, Logan."  She looked surprised at the thought.  "But it's about time Alec did.  He's going to have to change his whole way of life and he's not gonna be able to do it alone, even if he thinks he can."

He turned around and looked at her, his blue eyes warm and steady behind the glasses.  Yet there was a sadness about him she didn't understand.  "I know you'll help him however you can, and you know you can count on me too."  

Max slid off her chair and stood close to Logan, close enough to touch him if she dared.  "I do know," she said softly.  "I just hope you know how much that means to me."

"Are we walking in on something the kid can't see?" Alec asked from the doorway.  He glanced down at his daughter standing next to him, her hand tightly gripping his fingers.  "Because we can go back outside for a few more minutes."

Max spun away from Logan and leaned against the counter, her arms folded across her chest.  "You can go outside any time, but there's no need for her to leave.  She has manners," Max added pointedly.  

"Max and Logan try to get busy?" Joshua asked as he squeezed in the entrance behind Alec.  

"Hey," Alec said sharply.  "Time to watch the language, big guy."

"Joshua sorry."  He hung his head, prompting an immediate wave of guilt in Alec.

"It's okay, buddy.  Just think before you talk."  He clapped the larger man on the shoulder.  "You're the best of us at that anyway."

"Not really," Logan murmured.  If anyone measured his words to ensure minimum exposure, it was Alec.

"Hey, has Mole called?" Alec asked as he settled 49614 on a kitchen chair and gave her one of the pens she and Joshua had been drawing with earlier.  "Is it safe to go back to Terminal City yet?  I'm not real wild about being out here for White to trip over, at least not until we know if his men really did set the fi..." he glanced down at 49614, "f-i-r-e."

"He called a few minutes ago," Max reported.  "Connection's still bad, but before we lost it he told me to tell you to give it another hour.  If the last reporter hasn't left by then he's going to call in a bomb threat at City Hall and knock him loose that way."

Logan accidentally spilled some Sumatran blend on the floor as he spun around to stare at Max.  "He was kidding, right?  He's not really going to call in a phony threat like that."

Max smiled at his naïveté; Logan was, in her opinion, at his most adorable when he tried to apply real world logic to transgenics.  "His first choice was actually planting a bomb; I managed to talk him into the phony threat."

Alec leaned back in his chair and crossed his hands behind his head, smiling with every sign of satisfaction.  "It's good to have friends, isn't it, Josh?"  

"Play now," 49614 suddenly announced.  "Play ball.  Now."

Max snuck a quick peak at Alec; he seemed relaxed again, almost his old self, and there was no apparent trace of his earlier bitterness.  He might even be safe for human company again, she decided, or at least transgenic.

"Hey sweetie, could I play with you this time?"  Max smiled down at the little girl.  "It looked like a lot of fun."

Alec sat up in his chair.  "Actually that's a good idea.  Before we go back to Terminal City I want to take a look at that stuff Logan's been pulling in and not telling me about."

Logan flushed and tried to pretend he was deeply interested in the getting the ground coffee precisely level in the scoop.  "I didn't think you'd noticed that," he said softly.  "I didn't find anything that couldn't wait a few hours.  If you guys want to play some more, go for it."

"No, right now this is more important."  Alec picked up 49614 and set her down on the ground.  "You don't need me to play, do you?  You guys can do just fine without me."

"No," the child said quickly.  She wrapped her arms around his leg and hung on with all her might.  "Stay Daddy."

"Hey, it's okay; it's all good."  With a wince at his progeny's unexpected strength, he bent over and gently detached her from his leg.  "I'll be right in here if you need me," he promised.  "You yell, I come running; it's that simple."

Joshua squatted down next to 49614, though with his great height he still forced her to crane her neck to see his face.

"Joshua play ball too," he said softly.  

"That's right, you know Uncle Josh likes to play ball."  Alec pressed a quick kiss to the top of her head and turned her towards Joshua, who now sported a dazed smile at his sudden promotion.  "The two of you need to show Aunt Maxie how it's done, monkey."

"I'm gonna let you get away with the name one more time, just because it's a special day.  But after this... watch out."  Max reached down and took the child's hand, starting to guide her towards the door.  A moment later a realization stopped her.  "Alec, you can't keep calling her 'monkey.'  I mean first of all it makes no sense.  And it's not a real name."

"You named a kid 'Bullet'," he protested, hoping to divert her.

"It's not the same; he was old enough to say no.  Plus the kid just got shot, so it made sense.  But she deserves a real name."

Alec looked at his daughter, and then looked away, trying to avoid catching Logan's eye as he sought an escape route.  "So I've been told," he muttered.

"Play," 49614 insisted, reaching out to grab Joshua's hand with her free one.  "Now."

Alec immediately brightened; this kid had really great timing for getting him out of jams.  "You heard the lady.  Play.  Now."  He pointed to the door, not dropping his hand until they were safely out and the door was closed.

* * * * *

Ames White pulled a picture of his son Ray from the bottom drawer of his desk.  It was Ray's first, and last, school picture; one he'd never shown it to Otto, or any of his other coworkers.  Even before Wendy lost control and wrecked all their lives, he'd considered his family life private.  The time he spent communing with his memories of it was private as well.

"Just hold on a little longer, Ray," he whispered to the smiling boy in the frame.  "Daddy will be there soon."

Soon.  Soon he would have his son back.  Soon he would have the transgenics, especially 452, right where he wanted them.  Soon the Conclave would forgive him completely for his father's transgressions.

Soon.

First, though, he had to decide whom he could trust with Stage 3.  

He had been taught from birth to trust the Conclave and the Familiars; nothing his father later tried to tell him could alter those early lessons.  But the Conclave saw 49614 as a means to one end, not to several, and they wouldn't be pleased that he was taking matters into his own hands.  It wasn't what he'd been told to do; not how he'd been told to handle the transgenic problem in general, or her in particular.

49614 was proof that the mutants could pass on their artificially acquired abilities to a new generation.  She, and all the children like her, had to be destroyed immediately, before word got out.  No one else should ever know that there were beings other than the Familiars who could survive what was to come.  White had no argument with that.

Unfortunately he couldn't say the same for his NSA colleagues.  

The government paid he and his men well to capture and kill transgenics; his staff understood and even embraced those concepts.  But their idea of transgenics still ran more to the circus act escapees, while discounting the dangers posed by the more human-looking X-series.  And a juvenile X5?  One barely old enough to walk?  White wasn't at all sure they would be willing to see such a creature for the threat she was, let alone act on the knowledge.  The whole reason for this morning's pep talk had been to prepare them for that eventuality, but from the look on some of their faces as they left the conference room, he still had a long way to go.

He was walking a tightrope these days, and it was being stretched thinner by the minute.  He'd tried to tell himself that he didn't need the NSA; first and always he was a Familiar.  But the truth was that his value to the Conclave was partially dependent on this job.  It offered him a unique opportunity to advance their agenda and he wasn't willing to give that up. 

Somehow he had to convince the Conclave that he was right to let 49614 live to serve a purpose, and then he had to convince the NSA she had to die to serve another one.

Most important of all, he couldn't let either side know that he had his own agenda; one he would see to completion at any cost.

Which brought him back to... he slammed his fist down on the desk... Stage 3.

* * * * *

"So what aren't you telling me, Logan?"  Alec took one last glance out the kitchen window and then resolutely turned away, just in time to see Logan and his coffee cup vanish into the hallway leading to the living room.  "Logan!"

Logan poked his head around the corner into the kitchen again.  "You want answers?  They're in here."  He grimaced at the thought.  "What there are of them, that is."

"Oh goody; it's going to be one of those stories."  Alec rolled his eyes and followed Logan into the living room.

"I started with the foundling home," Logan said as he seated himself in front of his beloved computers.  "You know, to see if there were any government... federal government... connections.  Any contracts for services provided, any staffing... anything."

"To see if the rest of the kids were transgenic too," Alec said, following Logan's thought pattern.  "Manticore, or what's left of it, wouldn't foot the bill for just one kid.  So were there any?  Contracts, I mean.  People?  Anything?"

"Not a one, at least not that I can tell.  So far it look like it was just what it seemed to be:  a home for children who lost their parents, not ones who..."

"Never had any," Alec finished for him.  He sighed heavily and threw himself down onto one of the couches.  "Great.  That means they were probably after her specifically."

"That's what I thought.  Although I admit the name thing had me convinced otherwise at first.  I mean why would she still be called by a number if she was in a run-of-the-mill orphanage?"

Alec rolled his head on the cushion so that he could see Logan at his computer desk.  "She didn't say that was what she was called; you wanted to know her name and she told you."

Logan waited to see if that was supposed to be an answer or a punchline.  When it became clear that Alec was serious, he continued.

"Yeah, well, next step was the hospital records.  I wasn't actually expecting to find much there, but instead I found nothing."  He looked steadily at Alec, trying to find a gentle way of explaining his concern.  "And that's not good either."

"Wait, you're confusing me."  Alec sat up and stared at him.  "You said you didn't expect to find..."

"Much.  But I should have found something," Logan explained.  "Some record of her being there, being admitted, being examined.  Instead," he spread his hands wide, "zip.  It's like she was never there."

"Uh oh," Alec groaned as comprehension dawned.  "You're thinking the nurse was part of it.  Maybe one of the Familiars."

Logan nodded unhappily; there were times when he really hated his ability to ferret out information, and the more bars were piled up to imprison this little girl in her genetic heritage, the greater that hate grew.

"And not just the nurse," he was forced to tell Alec.  "I may be wrong about this part... firefighters are required to file reports for insurance and medical purposes too, but they're not always as prompt as medical personnel need to be.  But that firefighter who supposedly found her wandering around?  I can't find any mention of someone doing that during this fire.  They talk about rescuing children from inside the building, and they talk about the ones they couldn't get to in time..."

"God," Alec breathed.  "I never even thought... all those other kids."  Caught up as he was in the painful miracle of his own child's return, he hadn't given any thought to the children who might not have been so lucky.

"But there's no mention of a little girl being found outside the structure.  Now maybe the detective had the story wrong; that's possible.  But..."

"But given the givens," Alec jumped in, "you're thinking not."

"I'm thinking not," Logan agreed.  "I'm also thinking it might not be a coincidence that you got her back."  He hesitated before posing his next question, but it had to be asked.  "Alec, I know you memorized her barcode, but still... are you sure she's..."

"Positive," Alec broke in.  "She's mine, Logan.  The barcode matches and so does everything else from the first time I saw her."

Still Logan couldn't quite shake his suspicion.  "She was awfully small then, and babies tend to look a lot alike.  Telling one from the other, especially if you're not used to them... anyone can make a mistake."

Alec smiled ruefully.  He didn't blame Logan for his doubts, but it was a little embarrassing to have to explain how he knew they were unfounded.  "You're gonna make me go all girly, aren't you?  I know it's her, Logan.  I just know."

There was no further argument Logan could offer; he wasn't even sure one was merited.  He could see the certainty in Alec's eyes as clearly as he'd always been able to see the con jobs.

"Then we move on from there."

"What a mess."  Alec groaned and buried his face in his hands.  "I've got to get this straightened out.  I can't do anything until I know she's safe."

Being the transgenic's confidante was not a position Logan had chosen, or would have chosen, but somehow here he was.  For all their sake's, but particularly for the sake of the little girl playing ball in his backyard, he couldn't afford to blow it.

"So you're... still thinking about going ahead with it?" he asked in a carefully neutral voice.  "Giving her up?"

His gut clenched at hearing the words spoken out loud, but Alec forced himself to face Logan, and himself, as he answered.  "Why wouldn't I be?  Nothing you've said changes what I am."

"Is that what has to change?  Because if it is, raising her will probably take care of that."  Logan tried a small smile on for size, though he doubted Alec would buy it.  "Or so all my friends who have kids tell me."

Alec counted to ten, grinding his teeth the whole time.  He was willing to give Logan the benefit of the doubt and assume the human meant well.  That didn't mean he had to like where Logan's good intentions led him.

"You didn't tell Max, did you?"  

Logan took the subject change in stride.  "I thought that was your job," he said evenly.  "If you really intend to go through with this, you have to at least be able to say the words."

"Say that I'm giving my kid up to strangers?"  Alec's face was bleak.  "Yeah, that's an easy one to fit into casual conversation."  

"So don't do it."

"It's not that simple, Logan."

"What's so complex about it?"  Logan abandoned his computers and went to sit down in the chair next to Alec, determined to talk calmly and reasonably about this.  With Max and her passionate nature safely shut outside, he figured he had a better than even shot.  "She needs a father; you happen to be the one who lucked out and got to be hers.  And they all lived happily ever after."  

Alec wasn't looking for sympathy, and what he saw in Logan's eyes nearly undid him, but he made himself get past it.  He didn't need Logan's pity; he needed his help.  And the only way to get it was to convince the man that he was absolutely sure of what he was doing and why it had to be done.

"What has Max been wishing for since the day she met you?  Hell, since the night she left Manticore?"  He leaned forward, drilling into Logan's soul with his eyes.  "A normal life, a normal family; things people who weren't conceived in test tubes just assume everybody gets a shot at."

Logan pulled himself out of the pull of those hazel eyes with force.  Alec had all the requisite skills of a snake charmer, he reminded himself, and little compunction about using them.  His sincerity was not to be found by direct confrontation; he had to be tricked into exposing it.

"Now who's simplifying things?  Families come in all shapes and sizes, Alec.  To that little girl, you are her family; she doesn't need more."

Alec choked out an unhappy laugh.  "Exactly how much did it hurt to say that?"

"You have no idea."  Logan wiped the small smile from his face and got back to business.  "But I was being serious.  Children need love, not a prescribed number of parents to give it.  And you love her, I can tell."

"Then let me do what's best for her."  Alec didn't bother to deny Logan's charge; he wasn't going to lie but admitting the truth helped no one.  "This isn't some sudden panic attack, you know.  I've been looking for her for a long time, and even before that... I always wanted her to have the stuff that others kids take for granted.  Stuff that I never got to have." He sighed and ran his hand through his dark blond hair until stray locks stood up straight all over his head.  "I don't want her growing up into some sort of freak because I was too selfish to let her go.  I'm trying to do the right thing."

"It doesn't happen that often, Logan," Max said sharply from the doorway.  "Don't make him lose his place."

* * * * *

"Fe' nos tol."

White had been on his way out the door when his cell phone rang; he answered it thinking he could talk as he walked.  But the greeting he received made that an impossibility.

"Fe' nos tol," he said in reply as he closed his office door again.

"Our sister has told us the transfer went smoothly."

"It did," White agreed cautiously.  He knew the next few minutes would be crucial; he couldn't afford to waste a single syllable, or miss a solitary nuance in the Familiar's voice.

"So X5-494 has the child now?"

"He does."

A heavy sigh reverberated through the line.  "You are asking us to trust you with a great deal, Brother.  You had the girl in your possession and you deliberately let her get away."

"As bait, my Brother," White said quickly.  "She's our best chance for netting X5-452."

"You still believe 452 will risk everything to rescue this child?  A child she barely knows?"

"A transgenic child," White corrected him, making sure his tone remained sufficiently respectful.  "And not just any transgenic child.  There are rumors about she and 494; I don't know that I necessarily believe them, but..."

"We are risking so much on locker room gossip?"  The Familiar's voice grew louder, warning White that it was time to take control of the conversation.

"No, we are risking it on 452 herself, on all we have learned of her over the past year.  We can't beat her if we fight on her terms; we need her to bring the fight to us.  And the best way to do that is to use one of her own as bait; one who can't fight back for herself."

"For your sake, I hope you are right, my Brother."  The Familiar's tone grew warmer, hinting at a smile.  "The consequences of you being wrong are, after all, not something either of us wish to contemplate."

* * * * *

Alec rolled his eyes from Logan to Max and then back again, inwardly struggling to project the casual attitude that had become like a second skin for him.  "You gotta get a sliding door or something for that hallway, man.  Next thing we know White's gonna be out there and get all offended 'cause we're saying bad things about him."

"Did I hear right?" Max demanded.  "You want to give her away?  What, she's back for like ten minutes and already she's cramping your style?"

Alec was on his feet in an instant, all signs of apathy vanished as though they had never been.  "Don't even go there, Max," he growled.  "You have no idea what I've been thinking about this and..."

"No, I don't," she interrupted, "because you conveniently forgot to mention this was ever an issue.  A kid, I mean.  Your kid."  She glared at him, trying to disguise her pain as anger.  _How could she have been so wrong about him?_  "Or should I just start calling her your former kid?"

"Where is she?" he snapped, not bothering to acknowledge her snipe.

"Did I actually strike a nerve, Alec?  I was starting to think you didn't have any.  I mean you sure can't have any feelings."

"Where is she?" he demanded again, brushing past her to stride into the kitchen.  A quick glance out the back window assured him that 49614 was still happily playing ball with Joshua, leaving Alec free to yell at Max to his heart's content.

Or her to yell at him; he knew that was actually the more likely scenario.

"She's still outside?" Logan asked when he returned to living room.

"Yeah.  Of course I'm not sure why Max isn't too."  Alec looked at her coolly.  "You made a big deal out of wanting to play with her; was that just to get me off guard?"

"You're in here talking about giving up the kid you just found today... a couple of hours ago, if that... and I'm the bad guy for finding out about it?"  She raised her hands as though in supplication to any higher power that would listen, and then dropped them when no help was immediately offered.  "Even for you that's unbelievable, Alec."

Alec's anger abruptly vanished, leaving him feeling the same cold sick way he had the day Renfro told him his daughter had been shipped off to an undisclosed location "for her own protection."  But now, as then, he had to hold it together and play it cool.  

"Look, it's not like I don't want her.  She's a nice little kid, you know?  I mean she's smart, and she's not really fussy and she's definitely gonna be a heartbreaker when she gets..." Alec's voice fell away when he realized he would never see the time to which he was referring.  After a minute he cleared his throat and tried again.  "She's all good, okay?  But that's exactly why I think she deserves a better deal in life than I can give her."

"I just don't understand how you can think this way."  Her dark eyes were wide with disillusionment.  "We're Manticore, Alec.  We had no homes, no parents, no brothers and sisters except the ones we made for ourselves.  You can already beat that for her just by sticking it out.  You're her father," Max stressed.  "Blood.  Family.  Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

"Manticore is where you learned that blood matters, Max."  Alec spread his arms wide; behold the orator on his soapbox.  "Blood matters, genes matter..." his arms fell to his side.  "Since when did you start quoting the gospel according to Lydecker?"

Her fist connected with his jaw before either of them could stop it, leaving them both shaken.

"Family matters," she growled.  Her hands were both back at her side, but they were remained clenched into tight fists.  "And sure, maybe you could find her a nice one with two parents and a mailbox, but why try when you're already here for her?  And I'm here, and Joshua is here.  And Logan," she glanced over at the man in question, who nodded slightly.  "And Mole and Luke and Dix and every other transgenic in Terminal City; we're a family now, Alec.  And that's not even counting the gang at Jam Pony... most of them aren't scared of us anymore."

Alec laughed sharply, and then rubbed his jaw at the unexpected resurgence of pain; Max's punch had lost none of its power for all the time she'd been fighting with words as the unofficial head of Terminal City.  

"That's great, Max; just great.  They're not scared of us... most of them, that is.  That's just the kind of life I want for my kid."

Logan had watching them silently, waiting for a chance to get a word in.  Now seemed to be as good a time as any, maybe better since first blood had already been drawn and yet things hadn't progressed to a knockdown drag-out fight.

Yet.

"She's a transgenic, Alec," he said softly.  "She can't help that and neither can you.  She has the barcode to prove it too, so it's not even like she can hide the fact.  People know what it means now."

"I don't want her to have to pretend; don't you get that?  I don't want her to have to pretend that her old man didn't really do the things he did.  That the people around her didn't do them too."  Now Alec's hands were the ones clenched into fists, nails digging into his palms with the stress of trying to not only articulate, but share, his secret fears.  "I want her to grow up with people who don't run every party plan through a tactical database.  People who don't automatically scope out the exits whenever they enter a room in case someone starts shooting up the place.  Parents she can ask about what they were like when they were little... and still be able to sleep at night."

Max's brown eyes went a shade darker as she tried to imagine the future as Alec was seeing it.  "You're afraid she'll be ashamed of you?  Or is it that you think she'll hate you?"

"I am afraid I will get her killed."  Alec spoke slowly and clearly, for the benefit of those who apparently refused to understand.  "I'm afraid she'll have a short and unhappy life being labeled a monster and feeling like she has to continually apologize for who and what she is."  He leaned forward, his face twisted with a pain she had only seen him express once before.  "Until the day White or some other genocidal maniac puts a bullet in the back of her neck thinking it will wash away that barcode-shaped stain under the barrel."

He pulled back and drew several deep but ragged breaths, trying to regain the control he so seldom let slip.  

"Alec, we won't let that happen."  She put her hand on his arm, and pretended not to notice when she felt the muscles tensing beneath her fingertips.  "I'm not trying to shine you on; I'm promising you.  We _will protect her."_

He shook his head and gently removed her hand, holding it tight within his own for just an instant.  His voice was calm now, but the hazel eyes he raised to her face were grim.  "No, I will protect her, the best way I know how.  And I'll do it without making her grow up in an armed camp."

"Fine," she said recklessly.  "Take her to Canada.  Take her to... France.  Take her anywhere you want."  She didn't stop to let herself think how she would feel if he followed her advice; this wasn't about her.  "Just don't leave her off on some church doorstep for someone else to take care of.  She deserves better than that, Alec."

"She deserves better than me, Max.  And whether you like it or not, whether you give me two thumbs up or stick them both in my eyes, I'm going to see that she gets it."

* * * * *

To Be Continued 


	3. Chapter 3

**__**

In the Shadows

Part 3

By Gem

Music seeped up through the living room floorboards, coaxed from the old piano Alec had discovered in the basement months before. He'd taken 49614 down there to hear him play, in an effort to kill the remaining time before they could head back to Terminal City, hopefully doing something other than fighting with Max. For her part of the temporary truce Max had remained upstairs with Logan and Joshua, but she wasn't entirely happy with her decision. Actually she wasn't particularly happy with any decisions made thus far that day, as she told Logan about in length while he tried to decide why the piano music he was hearing sounded so familiar.

"I just don't understand how he can do this, Logan," she protested as she paced the length of the living room for what felt like the millionth time. "He spends all this time and all this money... money," she repeated emphatically, as though this was the hardest part to believe, "Alec spent money to find her, just so he can give her away to somebody else?"

Wound up in her own confusion, Max had forgotten that Joshua was not already privy to Alec's plans. Logan, however, had not, and scrambled for a way to redirect the conversation.

"Max, does that song Alec's playing sound familiar to you? I could swear I know it, but the name just isn't..."

"Alec give little monkey away?" Joshua asked, his eyes darting from Max to Logan and back again. 

"He, uh, he's thinking of it, Joshua," Logan said gently. "He thinks maybe she would have an easier life if she grew up with a... well, a normal family. Normal as opposed to, say, a transgenic one." He wasn't sure if Joshua understood; the dog-man didn't always let on how much he was absorbing. "With the conditions in Terminal City being as... primitive... as they are, and people still being a little, well, leery about transgenics... he's not sure if it's fair to make her live with all that."

"Can you believe how stupid he's being?" Max appealed to Joshua. "He has this beautiful little girl who, since she doesn't know him, still thinks he walks on water, and he wants to give it all up. Like this kind of chance for a new life comes along every day."

Logan felt helpless in the face of her pain; nothing he'd said or could think of saying seemed to make a dent. It was almost as though Alec was rejecting her instead of his child, and Logan couldn't find the words to make her see that neither one was truly the case. 

"I think that's the point, Max," he said, trying one more time even though he was no longer quite sure why. "He wants to give her the best chance he can, and he doesn't think that it rests with him. Even if I'm not sure he's right, I can't blame him for putting his own feelings aside to consider that path."

"Logan, you don't understand." She finally stopped pacing and stood before him, her dark eyes fixed on his face in desperate appeal. "Before he disappeared Lydecker told me that my mother didn't want to give me up; they had to take me from her. I don't know if he was telling me the truth but still... you don't know what that meant to me. You can't know. But this little girl, she's gonna grow up knowing her father had the chance to keep her and he didn't. He just," she turned her palms up in the air, "gave up."

Joshua looked anxiously at the staircase that led to the basement. He'd sensed something strange in the way that Alec looked at his little girl, something that made him seem sadder than he should, given the situation. Max's explanation should have made sense of Alec's mood, but Logan's idea was the one that took root. 

"Alec need help," Joshua said. His brow furrowed with the effort to convert his thoughts into the words that came so much harder to him than the images he painted. "Alec need to see little monkey safe with him in Terminal City. Safe and happy," he stressed. "Then he let her stay."

Logan smiled at the determination in his voice, and the big heart that prompted it. He just wasn't sure it would be as simple as Joshua had pictured it.

"Maybe, Joshua, maybe," he allowed. "I think you've hit on the real key, though; Alec needs to know we're on his side." He looked hard at Max. "If we do nothing but yell at him, he'll simply stop listening."

"So this is all my fault now?" she exclaimed.

"That's not what I meant," Logan hastened to assure her. "I'm just saying that nothing irrevocable has happened yet. If we keep our cool and don't push him, maybe he'll realize on his own what the real right choice is."

"Great," Max grumbled. "So we're back to Plan A: hope that Alec can figure out right from wrong. Wind him up and watch him walk into walls."

"Maybe Brin help," Joshua suggested after a moment's puzzled reflection. "Alec talk to Brin; talk almost every night. Maybe he listen to Brin."

Her older sister's name was beginning to grate on Max's nerves. It wasn't that she minded Alec having other friends; she was totally cool with that. But it was hard to see how well Alec got along with Brin when her own relationship with her sister was so messed up. They seemed to connect on a level that Max couldn't get to; one she wasn't even invited to. And that hurt, more than she could tell either of them.

"You want Brin to lead him down the right path?" she scoffed. "Now there's the blind leading the blond. We might as well pack the munchkin's bags right now."

Joshua transferred his worried gaze from the staircase to Max as her words raised another concern. "No bags to pack yet."

"You just said a mouthful, Big Fella," Max sighed as she turned to stare out the front window.

* * * * *

The former executive suite of Raddon Biotechnology Inc., located on half of the 6th and final story of the Raddon Building, bustled with activity the like of which had not been seen there for over a decade. Mole's initial crew of volunteers had grown considerably; transgenics of all shapes, sizes and genetic markers moved swiftly from the executive secretary's spacious anteroom to the Director of Development's corner office, and then through a connecting door to the slightly smaller office of the former Director of Marketing. The offices of the Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President, once located on the opposite side of the executive secretary's sanctum, were unfortunately unavailable for remodeling thanks to a Molotov cocktail flung at the building during the siege.

Remnants of furniture were being carted from one office to the next, and occasionally out the door when it was determined the repair time would be too great. In the offices, now designated the master bedroom and the child's bedroom, hammers could be heard pounding away, trying to construct items such as beds and nightstands, things not commonly found for salvage in abandoned technology parks. Everywhere there were buckets of soapy water, and mops were being wielded with good will if not enthusiasm in the quest to remove more than 10 years worth of dust, dirt and biotoxins.

"Look alive, people," Mole barked as he strode through the center of the chaos. "We're at T minus 10 minutes and counting." 

Brin stopped in the doorway to the secretary's office and stared in amazement. She had been helping at the other end of the spectrum, removing Alec's possessions from his current quarters, but that task hadn't been nearly as involved as this. What Alec lacked in terms of child furniture, and furniture in general, his friends were apparently building out of scraps and good intentions. Luckily for him, both were in good supply.

Her study was cut short when she was pushed into the room on the end of a two-by-four.

"Sorry," called a tall, vaguely feline woman as she brushed past with the plank held out like a lance. 

"You here to gawk or to work?" Mole growled at Brin. "We're running out of time." 

"I had to run out to get this for... her."

Mole smiled grimly as he inspected the small cylindrical lamp she held up before him. "_Her_, huh? Thought you knew her designation already. 'Course I haven't heard how you knew; bet that's a story all by itself."

Brin evaded his shrewd eyes; the explanations she had to make were meant for Alec's ears. "I... I thought she'd like this lamp," she said instead. "When we first escaped I stayed in this house and..."

"Yeah, great," Mole broke in. "Kid's room is over there." He waved at the Director's of Marketing's former home away from home and stalked into the new master bedroom to check on the progress of the window cleaning/repair.

Brin bit her lip as she looked down at the lamp. As a frightened child a lamp much like this had symbolized all the warmth and love that Manticore denied her, and she had wanted to share that feeling with Alec's daughter. But now, in light of all the activity going on around her, her small gesture seemed silly. Everyone else here was trying to construct a home, with practical things like beds and a table and...a piano?

"Where did you find a piano?" she asked Luke as she crossed the anteroom to examine the old upright. "_Why_ did find a piano?" Suddenly she realized she might have made him feel just as insignificant as Mole had just made her, and she hastened to add, "I mean it's beautiful, but... why?"

Luke beamed as he stroked the dusty top of the piano. "She is a beauty, isn't she? For an old girl." He reached down and tapped one or two of the yellowed ivory keys. "Joshua said something once about Alec knowing how to play so we thought..."

"You thought," Mole interrupted as he passed through the anteroom on his way to the hallway.

Luke accepted the rebuke with a bashful smile. "_I_ thought it might be a good idea to put one in here. It's not like we have anybody in Terminal City to give the little girl ballet lessons – not even the X-series ever infiltrated the Bolshoi... at least none that we know of. But piano lessons?" He shrugged the problem off as inconsequential. "Alec can do that. Then she'll be just like normal kids."

Brin couldn't help but smile back at him; he was so proud of the idea that they could offer 49614 the same things that a "normal" child, a non-genetically enhanced child not living in a toxic waste dump, might expect.

"But where did you find it? This used to be a technology park, right? Biotech engineering and genetic research companies. Who had a piano in their office?"

Now Luke looked slightly embarrassed, his normally pasty skin turning a dull shade of red as he indulged an obviously deep fascination with the C sharp key.

"I kind of spotted it a while ago in an old warehouse just south of Oak Street. I think they do bar supplies or something like that; at least they did. Anyhow, it didn't look like anyone was using it, so..."

"So you broke into the warehouse in broad daylight and stole a piano?" She wanted to sound casual about it; after all, she'd spent a lot of her years on the run scavenging and out-and-out stealing just to get by. But the idea of what Luke had risked, and why, stopped her cold.

"It's for a friend," Luke said with another shrug of his narrow shoulders. "And some of the guys helped too; it's not like I was walking around carrying a piano strapped to my back."

"But why are you doing this?" Brin made a wide sweep with her arm, gesturing not only to the anteroom but the offices beyond. "Why are all of doing this?"

For an answer, Luke copied her sweeping gesture. "Who do you see here? Mostly, I mean?"

Brin looked around her, at the transgenics washing blinds, and the ones taking out the garbage, and the ones building a bookcase against the far wall. She had an uneasy suspicion that she knew the answer Luke was looking for, but she chose the more politic response.

"I see Manticore."

Luke smiled, as though he hadn't really expected any other answer. "You see what the world thinks all trannies look like – freaks. But I see Alec's friends. Even though we're getting more X's every day, he doesn't hang with them a lot. He lives on our side of town, just like Max." He began polishing the top of the piano as he talked, trying to work the dust out of every crevice to restore the instrument to at least a portion of her former glory. "You X's are a funny lot, especially the X5's. A lot of you still think of us as the 'nomalies.' It's not your fault," he added kindly when he saw her automatically open her mouth to protest. "When you guys were bad, they threw you down in the basement with us. Now you're living with the bogeymen; it only figures you'd feel a little funny."

"We're all transgenics, Luke," she said firmly, quashing the memory of any misgivings she might have had when she first arrived in Terminal City and was greeted by an oversized lizard with an automatic weapon. 

"See, that's the rest of you. You feel guilty for feeling funny, even though like I said, it's not really your fault."

"And Alec doesn't make you feel that way?" she asked curiously. She'd noticed that Alec seemed to spend a lot of time with Joshua and Mole and Dix, but she hadn't really spent any time thinking about why.

"Nah. See we freaks know that we all came from the same test tube; some of us just got spun a little faster in the centrifuge than others. Didn't matter to Manticore." Luke shrugged philosophically. "To them we were all just meat. Alec's one of the X's who knows it, too. He came out looking normal; most of us here," he gestured to the assembled transgenics again, "didn't. Just luck of the draw."

"Luck," she mused. "Now there's a word you didn't hear very often at Manticore."

Luke stopped polishing for an instant and looked up at her with something akin to pity in his eyes. "Manticore's gone. In the real world you make your own luck. Or," he finished with a little smile as he resumed his work, "you make it for a friend.

* * * * *

Otto hurried into his boss's office, a small yellow slip of paper clutched tightly in his hand. "Sir, we have a report that they're on their way back to Terminal City."

"Good, Otto; very good." White pushed his mouse to the side and rubbed his hands together briskly. The waiting, and all this damned paperwork it gave him time to do, was killing him, and both would get worse before they got better. But at least for the moment there was something he could do, some proactive steps he could take to spin things his way. "As soon as we're sure they're not going to come back because they forgot to turn off the oven or something, I want a team on the street working on those phone lines. We could be looking at an unofficial second headquarters; I want to know every communication that goes from there to Terminal City. Or there to anywhere else, for that matter. I want to know who lives there, who hides there... who walks by and spits on the sidewalk. Give me surveillance ASAP."

"Yes sir. Do you want bugs too? We can have the house wired in under an hour."

White considered the idea carefully. He had no immediate plans to send any of the Familiars into the house, but there was no telling what 452 and her little mutant pals had discovered about his father there already. He had no desire for the Conclave to learn anything more about his father's betrayal than they already did, and he was equally unwilling to expose his private life to his co-workers. 

"No bugs," he finally decided. "Not yet, anyway. But I want those phones taken care of pronto, Otto. Oh, and if you spot a cable hook-up, drill into that too. Might as well see if we can crawl into his hard drive and check any e-mails."

"Right away," Otto promised, turning to leave. He paused in the doorway, wondering if he could get away with a little nudge in the direction of White's master plan. "Sir, does the tapping mean we're approaching Stage 3?"

"Now what did I say earlier, Otto? We have to be patient; give 494 time to bond with the little rugrat. If he doesn't give a damn, we have zero leverage."

"Leverage?" Otto repeated doubtfully.

White smiled broadly at his assistant; G_od, how he loved this job some days_. "As a wise man once said, with the right lever, we can move the world. Or in this case, we can make 494 move it for us."

* * * * *

49614 was the only one in Logan's car to enjoy the trip back to Terminal City. Joshua was wrestling with both Max's predictions for the child's future and Logan's instructions, leaving him unusually subdued during a car ride he normally would have enjoyed. Logan was trying to follow his own advice to push Alec no further than Max had already tried, and Alec only spoke when spoken to. It was 49614 who upheld the burden of conversation, at least until they approached the gate at Terminal City.

Logan craned his neck and looked up at the water tower as they drove up, but he couldn't see anyone on guard this time.

"I don't know if it's a good sign or not," he murmured, "but I don't see Mole anywhere."

Alec took a quick glance out of Logan's window. "Back of the tower landing, two o'clock. Right... nope, there he goes." 

"Are you... huh." Logan squinted, and then was forced to ask, "Does he still have the gun?"

"Mole always have gun," Joshua rumbled from the back seat.

"Yeah, right. Dumb question." Logan sighed as he guided the car through the opening in the mesh fence formed by the raised gate. Some days he really disliked being the only one in the crowd without superpowers. He had an irrational urge to go to Crash after he dropped Alec off and have a drink with Sketchy, just to make himself feel better about being in his own skin.

49614 fell silent as they drove down the short street that led to headquarters. Alec didn't notice at first, but when she continued to be quiet and wide-eyed as they got out of the car and walked into the old factory, he realized she was probably scared. Without saying anything to the others, he stopped and squatted down next to her. 

"Hey, you doin' okay, monkey?" He reached out and lightly tickled her stomach, but only a ghost of a smile touched her small face. 

"You don't have to look so worried, you know; everything's good now," he assured her. "You're safe, and you're going to stay that way. Everything will be fine."

She looked doubtful.

"Trust me," he said, in the voice that had won over women much older and more experienced than she.

She still looked dubious.

"Okay, okay," he conceded with a sigh. "I suppose that's a good thing. Wouldn't want you falling for lines like that from a guy like me when you get to be old enough to hear lines like that from guys like me."

That apparently counted as sufficient apology for her present circumstances; 49614 relented enough to stretch up her arms and demand, "Pick up."

Alec grinned and did as he was told. "Not sure why I bothered to memorize that barcode," he drawled as he stood up. "You've got me written all over you."

"Go ahead," Mole growled as he came up beside them. "Make the kid cry."

Max, Logan and Joshua turned back when they heard Mole's comment; he had hinted at a surprise when Max talked to him from the house, but on this day all surprises were becoming suspect.

"Like the sight of your ugly mug wouldn't do the trick first," Alec teased. 

He snuck a quick glance down at the child, hoping she wouldn't react too strongly to Mole's unusual appearance. But apparently Joshua had sufficiently acclimated her to the more exotic end of the transgenic spectrum. Her green eyes were very big in her little face, and the hands clinging to Alec's jacket were holding on very tight indeed, but she didn't cry or whimper, even when Luke appeared by Mole's side and waved at her.

"Kids love me," Mole scoffed. Using the hand not carrying his beloved gun, he pushed the cigar over to the other side of his mouth and bit down savagely. "I have this warm, fuzzy quality going for me."

"Got some caterpillar DNA in there too, buddy?" Alec stretched out one hand and slapped it against Mole's midsection. "Or was that lunch?"

"Mole vegetarian," Joshua pointed out helpfully.

"Only damn things I'm sure aren't relatives," Mole growled, only half-kidding.

Joshua took a few steps closer to his friend, dropping one arm around Mole's shoulder in an apparently casual manner. His tone of voice was equally innocuous, yet the underlying command came through loud and clear.

"Mole should not use bad language in front of the little monkey."

"Yeah," Alec chimed in with a grin, "what's the matter with you, Mole? Were you born in a barn or something?"

"I'm just trying to broaden her vocabulary," Mole protested. "Kid needs to hear a little good old-fashioned swearing sometimes. You want her to grow up normal, don't ya?"

There was an awkward silence Mole didn't understand, a silence that made the tightly-wound Luke even more nervous than usual.

"I... I don't know about that plant thing, Mole," Luke stammered. "I saw this one trannie... swear to God he turned green in the sun. 'Course he also ate 16 live goldfish on a bet like ten minutes before, so it might not have been the sun that made him turn that color." He frowned and scratched his head, slowly working through the conundrum. "Come to think of it, if he had that much plant in him he probably wouldn't have tried eating the goldfish even if it was 50 bucks in his pocket free and clear."

Brin heard Alec's laughter as she approached from the catwalk above, and it caused her already slow pace to falter. Ever since she'd heard that 49614 had been found, she'd been mentally practicing what first to say to Alec. She didn't want to lie, but she also didn't want to spill out what might be unpleasant surprises in public. Unfortunately, she hadn't yet come across the perfect blend of tact and honesty when 49614 caught sight of her.

"Brin!" the child called out, looking fearfully past the X5 for the cold blonde woman who had always appeared by Brin's side.

Alec looked up at Brin when he heard his daughter call her name, and at first there was a smile on his face. Then with a sinking heart Brin could see the question leap into his head, quickly followed by the answer she dreaded.

"You know her, monkey?" he asked the little girl gently.

49614 nodded reluctantly and leaned over to whisper loudly in his ear, "Brin come and mean lady."

When Alec was smiling, really smiling, Brin had noticed that his hazel eyes turned very green. Today she saw the process in reverse when Alec turned back to her; she almost couldn't bear the flat, cold darkness from the one who had been her only friend in this new world.

"Mean lady, huh?"

Brin said nothing. 

"Sure sounds like the way I remember our buddy Renfro. How 'bout you, Max?"

He caught Max completely at a loss for words. As hard as it had been to understand the secret Alec had kept from her, a grudging part of her had to admit he'd had his reasons. But to learn that Brin had known the truth and not even told Alec was beyond Max's comprehension. Before she could gather her scattered thoughts, Brin had already jumped in to offer her own explanation.

"Alec, I..." Brin began, but he cut her off.

"You knew," he said flatly.

That made Brin hurry down the steps towards him, made her speak before she even knew what to say. She just couldn't let him believe her capable of the cruelty he was imagining. Not even she could be so vicious or unfeeling; not anymore.

"I saw her... I knew who she was." As she approached him Brin pretended not to notice that Alec instinctively shifted his body to shield the child in his arms. "But after the lab burned, Renfro had her moved. I didn't know where she was, Alec; I swear. Renfro never told me."

"But you saw her," he insisted. "You went to visit her." Brin had visited her the way he had not been allowed; the way Renfro would never have imagined allowing him. 

"Renfro brought me along." Brin was frantic to make him understand, but she could tell by the bleak look on his face that nothing she was saying could make it past the wall Alec had thrown up between them. She just couldn't make herself stop trying. "You know she kept me around like some sort of dog on a leash. She went to the nursery to check on all the children, and she would bring me with her."

The regret was written all over her face; it rang from every syllable she uttered. Alec had no doubt that Brin was sorry for what she had done, and sorrier still that he had found out the way he did. But right now, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't make that make a difference to him.

The truth was, he didn't believe in excuses. Oh, he might make some joking ones to Max about his sex life, or his work ethic, but the moment the man who used to be 494 realized he was actually hiding behind a bush with a detonator in his hand, ready to murder the girl he loved just because someone else told him to, he gave up on excuses. The things he had done for Manticore were beyond excuses, beyond explanations, and well beyond any 'I'm sorry' he might compose. They were what they were and he had to live with them. 

That didn't mean he could be so stoic about Brin's mistakes, however, especially not when they concerned his kid.

"The part I don't get is where you never thought I might want to know you'd seen her." Alec shook his head stiffly, not daring to look at the wide-eyed subject of the discussion sitting quietly in his arms. "With all the time we spent together the last couple weeks, all the stuff we talked about, you never even thought to drop a hint?"

Brin hung her head. "I didn't know what happened to her, and I didn't know if you did either. Alec, I didn't even know if you cared. And I never heard anyone else talk about her, so I thought..." she raised her head to look Alec in the eye, "I thought she must be dead."

She'd seen him smile many times in the past three weeks, and sometimes he even seemed like he meant it. She'd also seen him serious, and more than once she'd seen him concerned. But with all the talks they'd had about Manticore and the past, she'd never once seen him look bitter. 

Until now.

"Now there's a coincidence," he murmured as he walked past her. "Seeing as how they'd tried to barbecue the rest of us at the Seattle facility, I wasn't too sure myself what happened to her."

"I'm sorry, okay!" she said loudly to his retreating back. "If I'd known anything that would help..."

Something in Brin's tone broke the strange paralysis that had overtaken Max. She knew remorse when she heard it, because she'd heard it in her own voice way too often since she set all the transgenics free. Even when she did something she was sure was right, there was still no guarantee anyone else would agree.

"Alec, stop." Max hurried after him, grabbing his arm and pushing herself into his path when she caught up. "Brin wasn't trying to hurt you or your little girl. And you know the one good thing I could always say about you is that you don't hold a grudge. Of course," she lightened her tone, reaching for their usual bantering relationship, "that's probably because you're usually the one in the wrong. But now that you're not," abruptly she became serious again, "don't screw it up."

"Max," he said softly, "just let me go. I need out of here, now."

In a room filled with transgenics, speaking softly was no guarantee of privacy. Mole and Luke both overheard Alec's plea, and guessed where he was headed. After a silent momentary conference, they stepped up to circumvent his plans. Mole clapped him on his shoulder and tried to smile genially as Luke raised his hands to his face to pull it into an even odder shape than usual in an effort to make 49614 giggle. 

"Alec, old buddy, old pal, where you off to so fast?" Mole's strained smile abruptly shifted into a scowl when he beheld Luke, who was now sticking his tongue out and wiggling it. "Stop that," he barked. "She'll think that's what she's going to turn into someday."

"Fellas," Alec said wearily, "I appreciate the welcoming committee, but I hear there's these things kids take called naps and..."

Luke's hands fell abruptly to his side. "And that's gonna be tough to do," he said anxiously, "unless you come with us."

* * * * *

It had come to this. He was reduced to trusting Otto.

Not completely, of course; Ames White would never be that stupid. Otto was stupid enough for the both of them, which would hopefully work to everyone's advantage. But in order for that to come to pass, he first needed to weave a tale that combined enough of the truth to keep future machinations from tipping his hand, and yet enough lies to keep Otto pliable.

White sighed inwardly. There were times he really disliked having to play Agency games as well as serve the needs of his people. Add in serving his own needs, and things could become very complicated very quickly.

"Otto, my good man, I'm sorry to keep you from your dinner, but we need to talk." White waved at one of the chairs in front of his desk as he came around to sit in the other one. "Sit, please."

Otto gingerly sat down, trying hard not to look like he was surreptitiously checking the seat cushion for explosives. He had almost made it out the door when White called him into the office; all the rest of the team was already deployed for the night shift or off duty. He was the last one in the office.

He and White, that is.

"Otto," White began, "I know you have questions about Stage 3. Hell, you've told me you had questions. And earlier I avoided answering them because I... well, there are things about me you don't know."

His assistant didn't say anything. There really was nothing _to_ say. He agreed with White's statement, and he was hoping to preserve the truth of it. The stranger White's behavior became, the less Otto wanted any part of it.

"I was married; you do know that."

"Yes sir."

"My wife, she... well, she died a few months ago."

"Sir?" Otto was stunned. How could White have gone through something so momentous in his personal life and not had one word of it leak out? Security, even in the government... make that especially in the government... just wasn't that tight.

White had read the look in Otto's eyes and realized he needed to play up the details even more than he'd expected. "We had some problems at the end; I didn't like to talk about it."

"I see."

"One morning we had a fight, and I went to work. When I came home she was gone... and my son with her."

"I'm so sorry, sir."

White stood up and began to pace, feeling the honest rage build in him as he spun his tale. Wendy had betrayed him, and she had done so after he risked censure from the Conclave by letting her live. But to use his son as the instrument of her betrayal was the cruelest cut of all.

"She left me a note... I won't go into details. But she mentioned that her enemy's enemy was her friend. By then I was the enemy, so the transgenics were her friends. Or so she thought."

He paused for a moment, letting the suspicion take root.

"I don't know how she died; I don't know if they killed her outright or if she just died because she was with them. What I do know is that I haven't seen my son since that day. They... 452... won't even tell me if he's alive." He slammed his fist against the wall so hard his diplomas came crashing down around his feet. "But I know he is. He has to be."

"Sir, I'm very sorry for your loss. But I," Otto winced, "I still don't see what this has to do with your plan for the little girl."

"She's bait, Otto," White explained with thinly disguised impatience. "494 has been looking for her since Manticore went down; he wants to find his little girl. We've facilitated that... behind the scenes, of course... and soon, when he's full of what passes for fatherly devotion among mutants, we'll take her back. What wouldn't he do to rescue his pride and joy from our evil clutches?"

"He can turn over your son," Otto murmured as the light began to dawn.

"Exactly." White rolled his eyes, though he was careful to turn his back on his assistant first. Granted, Otto was an ordinary, but even for that he was a bit thick. "I offer an even exchange – I get my son and he gets his daughter."

"Except... sir, they want to study her. The higher ups, I mean. They're not going to appreciate it if we just let her walk off with her daddy and live happily ever after."

"And they will study her." White turned around and clapped Otto heartily on the shoulder. "You don't think I'm really going to follow through on my end of the exchange, do you? This way we net both the child and one of the DNA contributors – it will be invaluable information on what traits the X series might be passing on as a result of that breeding program." He shuddered in very real distaste. "Not to mention what must be going on in Terminal City these days. It won't be long before we're overrun with a new generation of transgenics, and we need to know right now what to expect."

He could see the wheels turning in Otto's head; any minute now he was going to smell the wood burning. White's plan as presented gave him the chance to do his patriotic duty, and help someone he knew at the same time. Whatever compunctions he might develop about taking the child from 494 wouldn't stand against the idea of reuniting his boss with the son so cruelly taken from him.

"Sir," Otto said at last, "what do you need from me?"

"The same thing you've always given me, Otto. Unquestioning loyalty. What man could ask for more than that from his friends?"

* * * * *

"This is... unbelievable." Alec stood in the middle of the living room, formerly known as the executive secretary's office, and looked around in complete amazement. "I mean it's incredible. You got chairs and a couch and a... a piano. And a bookcase." He turned to Mole and frowned. "Why did you get a bookcase?"

"Gonna teach the kid to read, aren't you?" the transgenic growled in response. "Or do you want her to turn out like you?"

Alec shuddered in very real distaste. "Not even gonna go there, pal."

"We couldn't do anything about a kitchen," Luke apologized, "not in here anyway. But we can fix up the old break room down the hall."

"Latrine's down the hall too," Mole pointed out gruffly. "No way to fix that – Manticore didn't teach anyone plumbing beyond a shovel and a pail."

"Diapers," Logan exclaimed. "You're going to need diapers. I mean she will." He slapped his hand to his forehead. "We should have stopped on the way."

"Diapers?" Mole asked. "What do you need those for?"

It was Logan's turn to be puzzled. "What do you mean 'what do you need those for'? And... stop looking at me like I have two heads."

Luke laughed nervously, his eyes darting from Logan to Mole. "Around here," he joked, "two heads just means you're one of the gang."

Alec rested his hand lightly on Logan's shoulder as he addressed his friends. "What our well-meaning, but genetically challenged friend here..."

"Genetically challenged?" Logan repeated, in mingled tones of disbelief and budding annoyance.

"Work with me man." Alec raised his voice and tried again, this time slightly more diplomatically. "What _Logan_ is trying to say is that he thinks someone this small," he gently raised the arm on which 49614 sat, "still needs diapers."

Mole snorted and chomped down on his cigar. "As old as she is? What does he think she is? Human?"

Logan pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose and stared down the lizard-skinned transgenic. "It was a perfectly reasonable assumption."

"Except we weren't made by reasonable people," Alec pointed out. "An army doesn't march proudly carrying its potty chairs. As far as Mother Manticore was concerned, as soon as you were big enough to walk to the latrine, that's what you used. And she must have been walking for months by now."

Logan's jaw dropped slightly. "But she's..."

"Transgenic. The word you're searching for is transgenic."

"But the people at the orphanage wouldn't have taught her so young. It wouldn't even have occurred to them."

Alec made a face at Logan's earnest but misguided protest. "No need to teach her; it's just kind of bred into us. You think they wanted to waste highly trained technicians on housebreaking..."

"Toilet training," the human corrected him with an exasperated sigh.

"Whatever." Alec blithely accepted the rebuke and moved on. "The point is: they trained us how to fight. Strictly offense. Anything survival related, we learned on our own, or we just didn't survive."

"The point is," Mole growled, "the latrine's down the hall."

"But we moved one of the tables from the break room in here, so at least you can eat in here if you want." With all the diaper controversy, Luke suddenly felt some of the shine had been stolen from their creation. "And you gotta take a look at the bedrooms. There's beds and nightstands and even lamps so you can read the little one bedtime stories."

"And again with the books," Alec muttered under his breath. Raising his voice, he added, "Seriously though, guys, this is... I don't know how to thank you. But how did you get it done so fast?"

"You have a lot of friends," Brin said softly from the doorway. She hadn't dared to come in further, although given the large number of transgenics now crowding into the room to see how their work was received, she probably could have escaped notice if she hadn't spoken.

"You have friends who can tear down, relocate and reassemble an entire base camp in under two hours," Mole corrected her. "The amount of stuff you had to move? Chump change."

"But why did you do all this?" Alec put 49614 down and gestured to the newly remodeled suite. "I had a room; it's not like..."

"You can't expect a kid to live in BOQ," Mole barked. "She just got out of the sweatbox."

"You didn't even have room for another bed in there," Dix pointed out. "We considered that option first, if it makes you feel any better."

Making Alec feel better was a difficult proposition at this point. He was genuinely overwhelmed by what his friends had done for him; nothing in his years at Manticore had prepared him for the way the Terminal City transgenics banded together and helped each other out. But at the same time he felt like he was pulling off the biggest con of his life in accepting their generosity. And unlike most of his previous cons, this time he felt very guilty about his success.

"I, uh, really appreciate everything you've done for her," he said slowly. "This place... it's great. You can't even tell it wasn't always a, well, a home."

In truth, there were some obvious touches that still spoke of the rooms' former days as office space. The chairs were of the hard-backed, under-stuffed variety, undeniably relicts of a decorator's efforts to make office chairs look like armchairs. The 'breakfast nook' featured plastic, cafeteria-style furnishings, and a quick peek in the bedrooms revealed that the closets and dressers were actually fireproof cabinets. It was a home in a fashion that might seem laughable to someone lucky enough to grow up with things like nightlights and garbage disposals, but to these refugees from barracks and dungeons and all the crawl spaces in between, it was a setting fit for the front cover of a decorating magazine.

A small voice pulled Alec away from his inspection of his new home. Under Luke's careful guidance 49614 had discovered the smaller bedroom; she was now standing in the doorway to it demanding, "Mine?"

He couldn't help but grin with fatherly pride; there were moments when the resemblance between them was truly scary.

"That's right, monkey," he said, joining her in the doorway to her new digs. "They made this just for... whoa."

Alec hadn't looked in either bedroom yet; the living room had been surprise enough. But the sight of his daughter's room, furnished with such great attention to detail made all the more remarkable for the time constraints involved, was a new reason to wallow in the fierce wish that this was all for keeps. 

His friends had found a pink bedcover from somewhere, or perhaps hastily washed a white one with something red to make it the color deemed appropriate for little girls. Although no curtains hung from the structure, someone had taken the time to nail an additional post to each corner of the pine-frame bed, and then a frame around the top, in an attempt to recreate a four-poster bed. A fruit crate, draped with a white scarf, served as the nightstand, and upon it rested a small, cylindrical lamp made of rice paper, with tiny cutout figures of carousel horses prancing in a circle inside. And propped up against the small pillow, as a final touch, sat a stuffed panda bear.

"Mine," 49614 repeated in a tone of distinct satisfaction. 

* * * * *

It took some time to clear the crowd from Alec's 'apartment;' his friends were justifiably proud of their efforts, and anxious to see that the newest resident of Terminal City was comfortable in her new home. But eventually Max, with Brin's unsolicited assistance, was able to steer the party back down to headquarters, leaving Alec and 49614 to explore their new home with only the aid of Logan and Joshua.

"Still can't believe they did all this," Alec murmured as he ran a light hand over the empty bookcase. "I mean I know Max had some stuff set up for Gem because of Regan, but that was during the siege, so there wasn't a whole lot of time for anything fancy. But this..." he stopped examining the bookcase and looked all around the room, "There still wasn't time and they did it anyway."

"Terminal City home now," Joshua offered by way of explanation. He looked up from the floor where he sat with 49614, companionably scribbling in the new 'coloring book' someone had quickly assembled out of scrap paper. "Must... make seem like home."

"He's right. Terminal City is a community now, not just a collection of abandoned buildings and lost souls." Logan reached out and gently tapped at a piano key, then another. When the resulting sound proved somewhat pleasant, he swung around on the piano bench and tried a few more keys. "They want you to know that you, and your daughter, are an important part of that community."

"Look, I don't do humble real well, so you might want to watch the soft soap about being an important part of the... ouch!" 

Alec's warning to Logan was cut short by a splinter, courtesy of the very new wood in the bookcase. 49614, however, assumed he was making a comment on Logan's musical skills, and immediately came to her father's aid. Scrambling to her feet, she scurried over to the old piano and laid her tiny hands beneath Logan's much larger ones, covering as many keys as she could touch. 

"Daddy play now," she informed her newfound 'uncle' sternly.

Logan raised his hands slowly into the air, grinning all the while at her protective streak. "Alec, I think you have a fan. Better play something fast before she gets rough."

"Are you afraid of a girl, Logan?" Alec teased before he stuck his injured finger in his mouth and sucked out the splinter. "Wait a minute, wait a minute; you're dating Max, so I guess the answer to that would be yes."

"Daddy play now," 49614 reiterated, switching her tone from commanding to plaintive as she turned the full force of her green eyes on her hapless parent.

"Coming right up," he said quickly. "Move over, Logan; I've got a request."

Logan obliged him by abandoning the piano bench altogether, leaving ample room for 49614 to sit next to Alec and lean in, watching with rapt attention every move his fingers made. After a few minutes of close, silent observation, 49614 glanced back at Logan and announced, "Daddy play good."

Her meaning was clear, but Logan accepted his less-than-favorable review with good humor. He was curious about one thing he had noticed, though, and now seemed as good a time as any to ask Alec about it.

"Alec, is it me or is she acting a little more... adult… than she did earlier? I mean she was walking and talking before, but she just seems more... aware. And her motor skills are better," Logan added when he saw the child trying to pick out the same pattern of keys her father played, a few octaves below him. 

"It's not you," Alec answered, pausing to reposition 49614's right hand on the keys before he continued. "According to Renfro, it's something she probably inherited from her mother. 416 could look like anyone, but she can act like anyone. She mimics the behavior of the people around her, kind of as protective coloration. Put her with a bunch of kids and she'll act her age, or maybe a little younger. Put her with adults and all the skill levels increase: motor, language, cognitive, you name it."

"According to Renfro," Logan said slowly.

He had left the question implicit in his statement, something Alec heard loud and clear. The transgenic glanced over his shoulder and smiled slyly as he admitted, "I might have taken more than just a peek at Renfro's files."

Logan almost hated to ask the next question; everything was, for the moment, serene and he was loath to disturb the fragile peace. But he didn't feel like he had a choice, not when he saw the little girl so determinedly trying to mimic her father's behavior to fit herself into his life.

"So does that mean I look for a family with kids, or without?"

He could see the remark hit home, but it gave him no pleasure to watch Alec's smile vanish as though it had never been, or to see the sudden tremor in the X5's hands as they momentarily faltered on the keyboard.

"You know, monkey," Alec said after he cleared his throat, "I think maybe we should let Uncle Logan go back to his nice toxin-free house; what do you think about that?"

"The toxins; my God, I didn't even think about them." Logan stared down at 49614 in dawning horror. "Are you sure she's going to be safe here? It's not like you can pass on vaccinations; she's completely vulnerable."

"Do you think I would have brought her here if she wasn't immune?" Alec demanded. "Sandeman didn't line us all up for bio-warfare shots, you know; he hard-coded the immunities into our DNA. She's got it coming from both sides; she'll be fine." He eyed the human sourly. "Now if you and Max ever get your act together and start thinking about collecting your own set of rugrats, that's another story. But she's fine."

"That's good, that's really... good." Logan paused for a moment and then turned to go; Alec had made it fairly clear he'd outstayed his welcome. The transgenic let him get almost to the door before he called out to him.

"I am serious about it, Logan."

Logan stopped, his hand hovering just over the doorknob. "I believe you're serious, Alec." He looked over his shoulder at the transgenics, father and daughter, as they regarded him from the piano bench. "I just don't think you're as sure as you say you are. Or as sure as you need to be."

"Who are you to judge?" 

"The guy you're asking to help you do something you can't take back." Logan turned the knob this time and opened the door. "I'll be in touch."

* * * * *

One slow step at a time, Brin forced herself to join Max in the sunken pit Mole called the transgenics' "war room." It had taken her a good five minutes to get from the catwalk above to this point, but she knew this conversation must be had, no matter how reluctant she was to begin it. 

"I appreciate you trying to talk to Alec for me, Max."

Max looked up from the map of the sewer she was pretending to study and regarded her older sister blankly. "I didn't do it for you; I did it for him." 

"I know," Brin acknowledged. 

She pushed her hair off of her face, still trying to adjust to its new, shorter length. For the same reason she'd grown her hair long after their first escape from Manticore, the discovery that Renfro had tried to roast her in her bed had prompted her to cut most of it off. One less tie to the Brin who had been. 

"But I also know you could have just said, 'Go Alec, I'm with you' and left it at that. You didn't."

"That wasn't what he needed to hear." Max's voice hardened. In her mind's eye she could still see the look on Alec's face when he said 'You knew,' and Brin's guilty conscience couldn't quite stack up against that memory. "It doesn't mean I think you were right, though. You should have told him."

"I..." Brin sighed deeply, "I wish I had. I just didn't know how much it mattered to him."

"Didn't know?" Max repeated, her eyes narrowing with suspicion. "After the way we grew up..."

"Exactly," Brin broke in. "We were bred to be soldiers, Max. That's the only thing we were ever trained to do, the only thing we were ever supposed to be."

"Times change," Max said shortly. "Whatever we were bred for doesn't exist anymore. We're just plain old human beings now, give or take some extra polish on the genetic markers."

"It's all so different here." Brin looked around the old factory, at the weapons on the table, interspersed with ham sandwiches and bike chains, at the transgenics repairing machinery and the ones watching a Seahawks game on a plasma screen TV that mysteriously 'appeared' one day. "It's like we all have this dirty little secret in common, and everyone wants to pretend it's just a... misunderstanding or something. I mean Manticore is what brought us all here, Manticore is the one thing we all have in common. But Manticore is the one thing we all want to forget." She hung her head, the chin-length locks of her straight dark hair falling like curtains on either side of her face. "I didn't mention 49614 to Alec because he tries harder than anyone to pretend the memories don't hurt."

"Max."

Max whirled around in surprise; given her superior hearing Logan could almost never sneak up on her. It was a measure of how deeply the conversation with Brin was disturbing her that she hadn't heard Logan approach until he was standing directly behind her. Even then he had to say her name to get her attention.

"Logan. I, uh, didn't know you were there."

"I'm gonna go," Brin said quickly. "I think... I think I have some thinking to do. And then," she added with a sigh, "I'm sure I have some more groveling to do."

"Just give him a little time," Logan advised. "Everything hitting at once... I don't think any of you know how to deal with it. From everything I've been told about Manticore, I'm guessing that teaching kids to cope with emotional upheaval wasn't big on their curriculum."

"Sure it was," Brin answered. "Right after singing lessons."

Max couldn't help the smile that gained purchase on the corners of her lips. For just a minute Brin sounded like her old self, like the big sister she remembered from days long gone by. 

"Nah," she scoffed in turn. "It was before singing but after Poise and Deportment." She threw a light punch at Brin's upper arm. "You just used to skip class a lot."

"And now I'll be skipping on out of here," Brin promised.

"Now that I got to see, sista."

Logan watched their bantering with a smile, and he was still grinning when he found himself alone with Max.

"It's nice to see you two kid around like that. I know you wanted things to be like they used to be."

Max's lightened mood abruptly shifted. "And that's a wish I'm obviously not gonna get. But yeah," she made the effort to smile again, for Logan's sake, "I'm glad we can still kid around a little too. Now if she can just fix things with Alec..."

"That may take some time," Logan interjected. "But while they're trying, how about a little time staying out of it? As in, we do our thing, they do theirs and maybe we compare notes some day. Or," he added, thinking back on all the unwanted details he had learned about Alec's life in the past few hours, "maybe not."

"I don't know about that," Max answered slowly. Each word sounded as if it were being dragged from her, but she didn't hold back a one. "Things are all haywire around here right now; I really don't think I should go anywhere."

"Not even for dinner? I've got all the ingredients for my famous chicken Florentine stashed away in the kitchen at Joshua's house... assuming they didn't eat that after the little hot dogs. And even if they did," he turned up his hands, "so what? A bottle of wine and thee; what more could a guy ask for?"

"Logan, that's so sweet," she rested one hand on the sleeve of his coat, "but no. Not tonight. They need me, even if it's only to know that I'm here."

He wanted to protest, or to cajole her some more. He wanted to woo her with words in lieu of the simple gestures like taking her hand or stroking her hair that he had once taken for granted. But he'd known Max long enough to know when she couldn't be swayed. Her family was what mattered most to her tonight and he...

... didn't seem to be a part of it, at least not like he once was.

"I guess I'll just be going then," he said quietly. "I'll stop by again tomorrow to check on things, see if Alec's changed his mind..."

"Come to his senses," she corrected him grimly.

"If you need me... if you need anything, just call, okay?"

"I will. And if I didn't say it before, thanks."

"Sure. No problem." He started backing up, his blue eyes fixed on her face as though he wanted to store up memories before a long separation. "What are friends for?"

Suddenly she realized there was something wrong in his tone; there was a ring of something he was agreeing to that she didn't even know she'd proposed.

"Logan, wait!" she called out.

But he didn't stop. He didn't even turn around. And in that moment, that one tiny, finite moment, she chose not to pursue him.

* * * * *

****

To Be Continued


	4. Chapter 4

Author's Note:  Many thanks to my new beta, Rhasa, for all her help.

In the Shadows

Part 4

By Gem

Alec paced anxiously within the confines of his new living room, wishing he could think of a word other than 'confining' to describe it.  It was just a little after 9 pm; only a few short months ago he would have been hanging with his human buddies at Crash at this time of night, scoping out the ladies and hustling a few games of pool.  Only a few weeks ago this hour would have found him playing cards with his transgenic friends over in HQ.  Tonight though, he was debating the relative merits of watching TV with the volume turned almost all the way down, or reading one of the books Joshua had brought over from his room.

Or going crazy, quietly of course; that was currently number one with a bullet.

The kid... he refused to call her by a number even in his head, and he wouldn't let himself use the name tickling in the back of his mind... was asleep.  He'd checked on her twice in the last ten minutes just to make sure of that; at least that was the excuse he'd used.  If he was totally honest with himself he had to admit he'd checked on her more to make sure she was really here, not just really asleep.  It still seemed so unreal that after all this time she was here with him.

For a little while anyway; he couldn't let himself forget that part.

She'd kept him busy to the last, wearing out even his normally hyperactive body and mind, but he'd found it bothered him a lot less than he would have expected.  In fact, he hadn't minded it at all.  Maybe some of that was because he knew it wasn't a permanent situation, but even Alec couldn't con himself into believing that was the whole reason he was enjoying his sudden plunge into fatherhood.  

He wished he could.

His daughter seemed to switch gears as fast as he did, much to Alec's delight; they'd moved easily from playing the piano to some more coloring to playing catch, with the laughing toddler as the ball and Alec doing the catching.  Dinner had arrived twice, first a pizza courtesy of Joshua and Luke.  Later Gem, the closest thing Terminal City had to a resident expert on childcare, arrived with something greenish and sprout-like that she claimed was good for growing children.  49614 had eaten with enthusiasm whatever was offered, although according to Luke, she made the exact same face Alec did when she first saw a leafy green vegetable reaching for her.  

When bedtime arrived he'd put one of his T-shirts on her as a nightgown and tucked her in, believing that would be the end of her day.  Alec was quickly set to rights, however, when she sat up and demanded a story.  He was at a loss; he had no intention of sharing the stories he'd been told in childhood, not ever.  And obviously his brother Ben had sucked all the imagination out of their shared gene pool, because Alec couldn't make up a story to save his life.  In the end he simply revised a true story, telling her of a beautiful princess who battled the evil Gossamer to save her Prince Charming, and the court jester, from a fate worse than death.  And if he gave Max and Logan the 'happily ever after' they seemed incapable of finding for themselves, it was only to see his little girl smiling as she closed her big green eyes.

And now here he was, with a sleeping child in the other room and nothing he could do but stay quiet himself until it was time to go to bed.  Unfortunately, if there was one thing Alec hated, it was quiet – it allowed him far too much time to think.

A knock on the door rescued him from his own thoughts; he all but ran to let in his savior, only to falter when he realized the identity of his visitor.

"Brin," he said awkwardly, backing up a pace or two from the door but not quite inviting her in.

She smiled hesitantly and held up a half-full liquor bottle in front of her, waving it slightly for emphasis.  "I come bearing Scotch and apologies."

"Scotch, huh?"  A reluctant grin tugged at the corners of his mouth.  "Trying to get me drunk so you can have your way with me?"

She threw a doubtful glance down at the bottle.  "Would I actually need alcohol for that?"

Alec quickly decided this was not an avenue of discussion he wanted to venture down, especially not with his kid asleep in the next room.  "I'm not so sure it's a good idea anyway.  Not," he held up a hand in anticipation of an objection or an apology, "because of... earlier.  I'm just thinking maybe I shouldn't be sitting around getting hammered in case she," he jerked his head towards the closed bedroom door, "needs something."

"Good point."  Brin gnawed on her lip, and decided to change her strategy.  "But I don't know that you're in much danger of getting drunk on this stuff, Alec.  This is the Scotch we had last week; do you remember that?  It's not even 2 years old and it has all the kick of an X4 after a half-hour in the iso-tank."

"Catching on to the black Manticore humor already, I see."  Despite his sarcastic tone, he stepped back and waved her into the living room.  "I guess I could risk one drink."

"Great."  She tucked the bottle under her arm and slipped past him into the living room.  "Do you have any idea where they put your glasses, or are we going to do this the old-fashioned way and suck it straight out of the bottle?"

"I suppose you'll want the glasses clean too, if we're going to be all formal about this."  Alec was backing up towards the half-open door to his bedroom as he spoke.  "They put all the breakable junk in my room; I guess they had the idea that, I don't know, kids break stuff?"  He shrugged and grinned at the foolish notion.  "I'll grab a couple of glasses and be out in a flash."

In reality he was gone several minutes, giving Brin ample time to wander around the living room and inspect all the finishing touches she had been too busy to notice earlier.  She had just finished admiring 49614's attempt to draw concentric circles when Alec quietly opened his bedroom door and rejoined her.

"Turned out to be harder than I thought to find two clean ones," he admitted as he handed her a blue plastic tumbler.  "So in honor of being my one millionth guest... today, that is... you get to use the glass I stole from the strip joint near the bus station."

"A strip joint, you say?"  She smirked at him as she poured her drink into the tumbler and then held out the bottle for his use.  "Guess drinking's not the only thing you're going to have to give up now, is it?"

Alec carefully avoided her eyes as he poured some Scotch into his toothpaste glass.  "Yeah, well, we'll see how things play out."

She sensed he was hiding something from her, but even in just the short time that she'd known him she'd come to realize Alec couldn't be pushed.  It went against the grain to let the comment slide, but she decided she was already in deep enough; there was no point in antagonizing herself right out the door again.

"So how do you like the new digs?" she asked, hoping she'd landed on a safely neutral subject.  "I couldn't believe it when Mole suggested all this.  I mean it seemed really sweet but..."

Alec grinned and finished her thought, "But it seemed really sweet, and it was coming from Mole.  I can see how that would throw you."  He glanced around the room he was still becoming accustomed to.  "It definitely threw me."

"In a good way?"

"Sure."  He looked surprised by the question.  "This place is great, and she was just over the moon about her room.  She, uh, really liked that lamp you gave her."

"You knew?"  She'd spoken out of surprise, and without thinking; it wasn't until she saw the look on his face that she realized her words were an echo of his from that afternoon.  "I mean, who told you?" she added quickly.

He cleared his throat and pushed away the memories of the afternoon, just as he could see she was doing.  Seeing the lamp, and knowing what it meant to Brin, had softened Alec's attitude considerably; he didn't want to stir things up again now.

"You did," he said after a minute.  "I think it was the first, or maybe the second night we stayed up talking.  You told me about the place where you stayed when you first escaped Manticore, and I remember you mentioning a lamp like that.  When I saw it in her room, I figured it had to be from you."

"I almost bought one for myself too," she confessed.  She took a quick sip of her drink, hoping the alcohol would explain the sudden redness in her cheeks.  "I know it's silly, but it just makes me feel... safe, I guess.  Normal."

She could tell from the darkness that briefly shuttered Alec's eyes that she'd once again touched on a sore spot, but all he said in response was, "That's the plan, isn't it?  Normal."

"I, well, I didn't buy it," she stammered, trying to back away from whatever pain she was unwittingly inflicting.  "Maybe I could just come over sometimes and borrow... what are you going to call her, Alec?"  She frowned as she realized it was a question she hadn't thought to ask anyone yet.  "No one told me."

Alec took a large hit of his drink, grimacing as the raw liquor hit the back of his throat.  "That's because it's a question with no answer."  He took another swallow, this time a smaller one.  "At least not an answer anybody likes."

Brin put her glass down on the battered end table retrieved from the CFO's office and settled herself uneasily on the sofa.  She'd tried dancing around the raw patches a few times already, but apparently she just wasn't surefooted enough to avoid them.  Her only hope now was full disclosure.

"Alec, what aren't you telling me?"  She flushed as she realized how he might interpret her question, how he had every right to interpret it.  "I know that sounds pretty arrogant coming from me, but..." she turned her palms upwards in appeal, "there's something eating at you.  I can see it; I can feel it.  I want... I want to help, like you've helped me.  To make it better, if I can."

"You can't," he said shortly.  A moment later he regretted his sharp reply when he saw the hurt register in her eyes.  "It has nothing to do with you, Brin, or with anything you did or didn't do."  

Alec began to pace the length of the living room, as though he could find a physical way out of his self-created mess.  "Look, I'm not mad about Renfro anymore, at least not much.  But there's no way for you to fix this, because you're not the one doing the breaking."

"But I'm pretty good with a broom," she said gently.  "Just ask Dix.  I can help pick up the pieces, if you let me."

He took one last swallow of his drink and reached for the bottle on the table to refill his glass.  A glimpse of his daughter's bedroom door out of the corner of his eye changed his mind, however; instead Alec placed his glass next to Brin's on the end table and walked around to sit on the far end of the sofa.

"How about we skip the metaphors, okay?" he asked plaintively.  "It's been a tough day."

"I would've thought it was a great day," she countered.  "You got your daughter back after all this time, and your friends made you this new little home; life should be good.  Really good."

"It is," he automatically protested.  In a quieter voice he added, "It's just not going to stay that way."

Brin frowned at his cryptic comment.  "I'm sorry, I must have left my secret decoder ring back at Manticore.  And then with the fire and all... you want to try that again in English?" 

Alec wasn't going to tell her, at least not tonight.  He'd already endured enough dirty looks and disapproval from Max and Logan and even Joshua with his puppy-dog eyes.  He didn't need any more guilt, not today.

"I'm not keeping her," he heard himself say, despite his private resolution.  "I can't keep her.  So go ahead and join the 'We think Alec is an idiot' club – Max is probably still collecting dues."

* * * * *

When he lived alone at Father's house, Joshua usually painted during the day.  The lighting was better, and it was a good way to pass the time until his busy friends could come and visit him in the evening.  Since moving to Terminal City, however, Joshua had as little free time before dark as any ordinary; as a result he'd learned over the past few months to paint by lamplight, and sometimes even candlelight.  He didn't really mind the change in his routine, but he was starting to envy Max and her feline DNA, at least when it came to night vision.

He was deeply intent on his latest painting when Luke walked down the corridor; he didn't hear his friend's footsteps going past his room any more than he heard Luke turn around and come in.  Joshua was so focused, in fact, that he had no idea he was no longer alone until the smaller transgenic's hand fell on his shoulder and inadvertently pushed the paintbrush upwards.

"Uh... oh."  Luke raised both hands in the air and took a step backwards.  "Hey man, I am so sorry.  I just wanted to..."  His quicksilver attention was caught by the half-finished painting on the easel, and his guilt was immediately overwhelmed by admiration.  "Say, that's really nice.  Really pretty."  He shot Joshua a curious glance.  "What is it?"

The misunderstood artist growled something under his breath, but reluctantly turned his eyes back to his work-in-progress.  He knew Luke had intended no harm when he touched him, just as he could hear the sincerity in the transgenic's appreciative comments.  

"Joshua #113.  Alec and little monkey."

"Oh yeah?"  

Luke leaned forward, peering at different sections of the canvas, but at first all he saw was the usual blend of colors and stark lines.  Joshua's art tended to be non-representational, which meant that most of his friends had to be walked through his work section by section.  This time, though, when Luke tried leaning back and squinting, he did actually see something there.

"Wait, oh... wait a second, I think I get this one.  That's her, right?"  He pointed to a green, violet and gold section on the lower right of the canvas.  "She's playing with... well, it looks like blue chopsticks or something."

"Crayons," Joshua supplied.  He was well aware that most people didn't see people and feelings the way that he did, or at least they didn't express them that way.  By now he was used to having to explain his work.  So far, though, no one had laughed, so he really didn't mind.  "Little one is coloring."

"Yeah, I see it now."  Luke was getting excited; this was like solving a puzzle, only he was actually the one getting the right pieces into place.  Some of them, anyway.  "And that's Alec over there by the..."  He looked up expectantly at his tall friend. "Is that what I think it is?"

Joshua nodded.  "Piano."

"Thanks, big guy."  Luke started to clap Joshua on the back in a display of camaraderie, but thought better of it when he saw the smear of green in with the dark blue and blackened gold that was Alec.  "But isn't he lookin' at the piano instead of her?  Or did you just forget to give him a mouth?"  He grinned at the thought.  "Wouldn't that be something?  Alec without a mouth?"

"Alec... see only the past now, cannot look away," Joshua explained in his usual oblique fashion.  "Little monkey is future."   

"That's deep, man.  I, uh," he scratched his head, "don't get what the piano has to do with it... it's new.  Sort of.  But hey, that just makes it deeper, right?"  

Joshua grunted, though it was difficult to tell from his tone if he was expressing his thanks or suggesting that art appreciation lessons might not be amiss.

Luke squinted again, and then backed up, trying to see the painting as a whole now that he'd identified some of the subjects.  "Hey, you know, Joshua, this painting is really pretty and all, but it's... it's kind of sad."  He looked uneasily from the painting to the artist, hoping he could get his point across without offending Joshua.  "Couldn't you give it a happy ending or something?"

Joshua grimly lifted his paintbrush to delicately touch up the misplaced green streak on Alec's back.  "Hope so," he said quietly.  "Hope... hope so."

"Maybe a kitten," Luke suggested, pointing to an unfinished section of the canvas near 49614.  "Right about here."

Joshua growled softly.

"Or a puppy," Luke said quickly, putting both hands behind his back before he got into more trouble.  "Puppies are good too."

* * * * *

It took Brin a minute to catch her breath after Alec's announcement; a minute she hoped was not too long for her words to have meaning.  

"I don't think you're an idiot," she said slowly.  "I'm just not sure why you think you can't keep her.  _Can't,_ Alec?"  Brin smiled crookedly at him as she fumbled for the right thing to say.  "You don't seem like a guy who uses that word a lot.  Until this moment I wasn't even sure you'd heard of it before."

"Get serious; Manticore was all about _can't_.  It just took me a while to realize that some of them I'm never gonna be able to shake."

"So you're giving her up because of Manticore?"  She leaned forward, looking him straight in the eye.  "What does that say to the rest of us?  Did you think of that?"

He shook his blond head vigorously as he scrambled to his feet.  "Oh no, you're not putting that on me.  Everyone has to make their own decisions, live their own lives.  Otherwise we might as well still be sitting in the barracks listening to Lydecker drone on about duty and discipline.  I'm doing what I think is right for my kid; end of story."

"But why is it right?  What makes someone else the parent you think you can't be?"

No one else had phrased the question quite that way, and for a moment it floored him.  He'd made a career out of thinking on his feet, though, and once he got started the words just seemed to pour out of him.

"Little things like, I don't know, a house where the air won't kill her school friends if she wants to bring one home.  Does that sound like a good thing to you?  Maybe a backyard to play with those friends in, instead of a break room.  Or hey, how about a school where she can actually make those friends?"  

Alec paused for a breath, but he suddenly noticed that Brin was the one who looked like all the air had just left her lungs.  His friends, Brin included, had all worked so hard to create this haven for he and his daughter; Alec was ashamed when he realized how his comments must burn.  

"Look, this place... it's great.  This is the absolute best a bunch of really nice people could do for me, and I will always be grateful.  The problem is that it's also the absolute best this place has to offer."  Alec shrugged in a vain attempt to appear resigned.  "And it's not enough.  It shouldn't be enough."

"Says who?" she demanded.  

For just a minute he hated her.  Brin was forcing him to say things out loud that he could scarcely even think about.  The only thing that saved the friendship growing between them was the trust she'd already placed in him.  She'd shared some of her darkest memories of Manticore, and it wasn't her fault if she expected him to be at least as brave.

"Do I really need to spell it out?" Alec asked fiercely.  "She's not safe with me."

Brin threw up her hands at his stubbornness.  X5's were conditioned never to retreat, but at this point she wasn't sure whether to blame his carefully fashioned DNA for his refusal to admit he was wrong, or just that stupid Y-chromosome it was hitching a ride on.

"Who'd fight harder to protect her, Alec?  Who would care more about her safety than you?"

He closed a door on the little voice in his head that said she was right in that, if nothing else.  "The question is: who wouldn't put her in as much danger as I am?  She can't escape being a transgenic, but no one needs to know she's my kid."

"But who knows who you are?" she asked plaintively.  "Not to hammer down your ego or anything but you're not exactly..."

"How did you find out that Max was here?" he interrupted her briskly.

"On the news," she answered without thinking.  "They had coverage of the..." she started to get a glimmer of where he was headed, and finished slowly, "of the siege.  Of both of you during the siege."

Alec smiled grimly; he'd won that round, but he would've been much happier to be wrong.  

"We made good coverage, Max and I; we looked normal.  Hell, let's give Manticore some credit – we look better than normal."  His voice deepened as he tried to imitate the news anchors that had made a mockery of his life.   "Two dangerous transgenics who look just like you and me.  They shop where you shop, drive down the same streets; they might've even delivered a package to your very house.  Film at 11."

"Alec..."

"Every time either of us got anywhere near the gates," he continued, not acknowledging her attempt to interrupt, "we were caught on tape or in photographs.  I still get stopped by people when I go outside Terminal City; so does Max.  And our pictures made it all the way to that little hick town in Vermont where you were holed up, so what do you think the odds are that I can raise her without anyone noticing?  Without anyone making her feel responsible because her father helped force the world to deal with transgenics?"

"Things aren't going to be like this forever."  Brin heard the words coming out of her mouth, even though she wasn't sure if she really believed them.  It mattered that Alec did, though; it mattered a lot.  "She's too little to mind yet, or even notice.  And by the time she does..."

He ran his hand through his hair and tried to force his tired mind to focus.  The full effect of the day was beginning to hit now, and he was unprepared for the impact.

"Logan is going to find her a good home," he forced himself to say calmly.  "Some place nice, and safe and... key word around these parts... *normal*.  That means parents who know childhood from boot camp."

She ignored his last comment; if it was true for him it was true for all of them, and she wasn't willing to sell the rest of Terminal City down the river just yet.  Instead she focused on the part of his argument that she could challenge.

"How do you know she'll be safe?" she demanded.  "At least when Manticore was around we had a shot at staying alive if we were recaptured.  But those government guys killed X7's in cold blood the day Manticore fell.  Kids, Alec, just like her.  You really expect a couple of ordinaries will be able to handle that kind of threat better than you?"

"I don't expect them to ever have to.  I told you Logan was helping me out; he'll hide her where no one else can find her.  She'll be just another anonymous transgenic."

"How can you be so sure?"

Alec really couldn't blame Brin for her skepticism; if he hadn't seen the guy in action he wouldn't have believed it either.  Of course, he also had the benefit of knowing Logan's secret identity as Eyes Only, which considerably increased the cyber-journalist's stock in the sneaky market.  

"He's got White's kid stashed away so deep even God couldn't find him.  I'd say he's got the creds."

"He's got who where?"

Brin was momentarily sidetracked by the idea of Ames White having a child.  She'd never seen White, but the way they all talked about him in Terminal City she'd developed a mental image of him as some sort of demon in wolf's clothing.  She hadn't actually pictured him having anything but a tail under his clothes.

"Never mind."   With difficulty she broke her brain away from thoughts of White and his possibly horned and hoofed offspring.  "Forget White's kid; what about yours?  What if you're wrong?"

"Don't fight me on this, Brin," he warned her.  "Even before Terminal City... when I was living out with the ordinaries and pretending I was one of them... I knew then that I couldn't keep her when... if... I found her.  It was always too dangerous."

His words made sense, in a heart-wrenching sort of way, but Brin wasn't buying the act.  Alec was the consummate con man, but he was always his own hardest sell.

"This has nothing to do with the kind of life you can give her, does it?  And it's not about the danger, because you've never run from a fight in your life; we're not wired that way."

Alec's mouth twisted with the effort of not correcting her impression.  He remembered only too well the fight he had walked away from, and the price Rachel had paid for his cowardice.  But he'd never told Brin about the girl he'd loved and then killed; he wasn't sure if he'd lacked the nerve or just the Scotch during those long late night talks.  He liked to think he just hadn't wanted to weigh her down with his stuff.

"This is about the kind of life you led before her, and since," Brin continued in a gentler tone.  "You don't think you deserve her."

Instinctively, Alec started to deny her contention, but then he realized it wasn't worth the effort.  In some ways Brin didn't know him at all yet, but in others she understood him much better than he felt comfortable with.  She seemed to recognize the dark parts he tried to hide from the world, maybe because she saw those same shadings in herself.

"Do you?" he asked wearily as he threw himself on the sofa again.

"You're asking the wrong person, pal," she answered quickly.  "You know what I've done; are you saying I should just give up on the idea of having kids someday?"

"I told you, this is just about me," he protested.

"Yeah, you did tell me, but you're wrong.  We were all there, Alec, not just you.  We all did things we're going to regret for as long as our genetically enhanced memories last... lucky us.  If you suddenly go all noble on us, you're taking everybody down with you."

"Now there's an interesting approach," he said sarcastically.  "Don't tell me I'm wrong; just tell me I'm being selfish on top of it all."

"You are if you go ahead with this."

"Gee, thanks."

Brin slid across the sofa, until her knee was touching his, then she reached up and rested one hand on his arm as it lay across the top of the sofa.  She wanted to offer a gentle, tactile reminder of her presence, but in her need to make him hear her, her light touch became a death grip.

"You think you're being selfish by keeping her," she said urgently, "because she makes you happy and she shouldn't.  You're not supposed to be happy about something that happened to you because of Manticore."  Alec looked away, but she put out her free hand and pressed it to his cheek, keeping the contact flowing between them.  "Alec, letting her go is the selfish plan.  Making her think she's not wanted when the truth is that you want her more than you feel like you deserve – that's selfish, trust me."

He smiled reluctantly at her last words, and turned back to look at her.  "Hey, that's supposed to be my line.  If there's going to be any 'trust me's' flying around, it's because I set them up."   

She brushed her thumb gently along his cheekbone.  "So who do you get to trust?"

He hadn't intended to kiss her.  For all that Brin was a beautiful woman, Alec had no illusions about how much damage she'd suffered under the less than tender auspices of Manticore.  He knew he was messed up enough for three people; he didn't need to take on anyone else's problems.  So in all their time together, no matter how late the hour became, or how low the Scotch ran, he hadn't tried to make so much as move one on Brin.

Not until this very moment.

Brin's hand was still resting warmly against his cheek; he reached up and cupped it in his own, sliding her palm slowly down his face and around to his lips, sketching soft kisses against her wrist all the while.

Alec had focused his gaze on her arm, until he pressed one last kiss to the tip of her fingers and she made a soft, inarticulate sound at the loss of his lips against her skin.  The noise broke his fierce concentration and Alec looked up, dragging his eyes up the long, slender column of her throat, past her slightly parted lips and on to the dark eyes fixed on him with such intensity it was almost palpable.  For an instant his breath stopped, and he was almost afraid to move and break the spell.

Almost.

He moved just a millisecond before she did, gently cradling her head in his hands as he leaned forward to steal a kiss, or three.  Brin molded her body into his as her hands came up around his back and clung for support.

Their lips met, tentatively at first, but with a growing need fighting for release.  They had both learned to suppress their emotions from the harshest of teachers, and this moment went against everything they had been taught.  Yet neither could deny the bond that had formed between them, and now that the first step had been taken to deepen it, neither wanted to stop or even slow it down.

Or listen for things like the apartment door opening.

"Alec, I just wanted to see if..."  Max stopped dead in the doorway, every thought wiped clean from her head.  Every thought, that is, but one.  "What the hell are you doing?"

* * * * *

Brin heard Max's voice before Alec did, and quickly moved her hands to his chest to push herself away from him.  He released her immediately, but she could tell by the confusion in his green eyes that he hadn't processed the reason for her apparent rejection.

"Max," she said quickly, half in greeting and half by way of explanation.

Alec turned around on the sofa so quickly that only genetically enhanced reflexes kept him from falling on the floor.

"Max, hey."  He raised a hand in half-hearted welcome as he steadied himself on his feet.  "What's up?  Something going..."

His question was interrupted by a low but growing cry emanating from the child's room.  In the space between two heartbeats, Alec ran through every possible catastrophe that could have befallen her, from the bed crashing down around her to White coming in through a sixth story window; each succeeding vision left him sicker and more helpless in its wake.  One endless moment later reason asserted itself, leaving him almost shaking with relief, and angry that he should feel it so deeply.

"Nice going, Max," he grumbled as he brushed past her on the way to the closed bedroom door.  "You can't just walk into a room; you have to make an entrance."

"I'm sorry," she said quickly.  "I forgot she'd be..." the bedroom door closed, "asleep," her voice trailed off.

* * * * *

Alec closed the door firmly behind him, blocking out the sounds of any sisterly squabbling that might occur in the living room in his absence.  His daughter was already frightened; she didn't need to hear transgenics in battle mode on top of that. 

She was sitting up in her bed, her sobs turning to whimpers once she knew she wasn't alone.  The lamp Brin had brought was turned to its lowest setting, offering comfort in a dark world, but apparently it had been insufficient for waking in a strange new room.

"See, didn't I tell you?" he asked softly as he sat down next to her on the bed.  "You yell; I come running.  Works like a charm, doesn't it, kiddo?" 

She quickly crawled into his lap and he wrapped his arms around her, unconsciously rocking her back and forth as he tried to soothe her.  "Did the noise scare you?  That was just Aunt Max; she's kind of on the noisy side sometimes, but she'd never hurt you.  She wasn't even trying to scare you; it was me she wanted to shake up."  

49614 looked up at him, her fright momentarily forgotten in the face of his curious words.

"Don't worry about it," he said when he saw the look.  "She just gets a little mad at me sometimes, but it never lasts long.  Just like that noise didn't scare you for long, did it?"

"Not scared," she immediately protested.

"Of course you weren't," he quickly agreed, fighting back a smile at her indignant tone.  "But if you were," he added, dragging out the last word, "it wouldn't be a big deal.  Everybody gets scared sometimes."

She frowned, trying to fit this idea into the world as she now knew it.  "Daddy not scared," she pronounced at last.  This much, at least, she could be sure of.

He hugged her tighter and swallowed the sharp laugh her words called forth.  She had no idea of the things he feared, of the thousand nightmares Manticore had planted in his brain and the newer ones spawned by Ames White and his band of merry Familiars.  If he did the right thing and let her go, she never would know any of it.  But the latest fear, the one that shouted at him in the quiet, was the possibility that he wouldn't be able to follow through on his promise to her.  When it really counted, he was no longer sure he could do the right thing.

"Well, I'm not scared with you right here to cover my back.  But even Daddy gets scared sometimes."

"I here," she said with satisfaction as she burrowed her face into his chest.  "Daddy not scared." 

Alec felt the heart beneath her cheek twist at her mumbled words.  She wanted to protect him.  He'd spent less than one full day with her in all her life and she still wanted to take care of him, just as he wanted to take care of her.

He kissed the top of her golden head and cleared his dry throat of any betraying quiver.  "Listen, monkey, Daddy needs to check on your Aunt Max and Brin and make sure they haven't set up a boxing ring in the living room or something.  And you need to go back to sleep."  He scooped her up in his arms and carefully slipped her beneath her pink bedspread, gently laying her head on her small pillow.  "Can you do that now?"

She nodded, her eyes already fluttering closed.

"I'll be right outside if you need me," he promised as he slid off the bed.  He took a step towards the door, and then he hesitated as the pull of things left unsaid kept him from taking another.

Both Brin and Max thought that his daughter would grow up believing he didn't want her, that his attempts to give her a better life would seem like a rejection.  And in the back of his mind were the words he once sounded off to Asha about emotional honesty.  If he loved someone, he should say so.  And if he wanted her...

"Monkey, hold off there for a second on the sleep thing."  He hurried back to the bed and crouched down by 49614's head, gently tousling her soft hair until she opened her eyes.  "Hey, sorry to wake you up again, but I need you to remember something for me; can you do that?" 

She nodded her head against her pillow, and opened her mouth.  Alec wasn't sure if she was actually planning on answering, but it didn't matter; her whole mouth was swallowed up by a huge yawn.

"I'm sorry, baby; I'll let you go back to sleep in a sec.  But first I need to tell you something, and you have to remember it for me."  He leaned in very close, fixing his hazel eyes firmly on her green ones.  "I love you, monkey, and I want you.  I have always wanted you to be a part of my life.  No matter what anyone says or does, no matter what happens, you have to remember that Daddy loves you and wants you."

"Love you," she whispered, and he wasn't sure if she was repeating his words to her or offering her own pledge of affection.  He supposed it didn't matter; the main thing was that he said it, and with her genetically enhanced memory, she would not forget it.

These thoughts carried him as far as the door, but they could support him no further.  Alec turned again, his hand hovering just above the doorknob, and looked back at his daughter as she slept soundly in her new bed.

He could comfort himself with the fact that he had told her loved her and that she was wanted.  But what did those words really mean to her?  What comfort would they be for her on the first night she spent alone in the bed of her new home, wherever that might turn out to be?  And what about when she turned 5 and he wasn't there to walk her to school on her first day?  Or at 14, when he wasn't there to glower at the boy who dared to take her on her first date?  Wait, no, make that 16 when she went on her first date, because if she were only 14 he'd have to do more than glower at the filthy little bundle of hormones who dared...

_STOP!_

Alec dragged his thoughts away from that part of the future with difficulty.  In his mind's eye all he could see was a junior version of Max's older brother Zack, looking at his little girl the same way that Zack looked at Max, but the image was too horrifying to withstand.  

She was going to grow up, go to college, get a job, get married maybe, have some kids of her own, and all of that she would have to do knowing what he'd told her instead of knowing him.  He could write her a note to explain everything, but with her memory he might just as well tell her now and let her pull the words out of her memory whenever she needed the touchstone.  It wouldn't matter anyway; they were still just words.  It was clearer to him now more than ever why he had to give her up; even in this, the closest thing he had ever done to a pure act, the best he had to offer was still...

Just words.

* * * * *

While Max was staring at the closed door, Brin was surreptitiously smoothing hair and clothing, trying to remove any reminders of what had caused the uproar in the first place.  By the time Max turned back to her, Brin felt calm, cool and presentable.  

At least she did until Max spoke.

"So that's how Manticore taught you to apologize?" Max said sarcastically.  "With your tongue?"

Brin was taken aback, but she recovered quickly.  "Would you prefer I tried another body part?  The last time I heard, tongues have it hands down when it comes to talking."

Max shook her head, the strands of her long dark hair moving like switches across her rigid back.  "That wasn't talking going on when I walked in."

"Exactly why did you just walk in, little sister?  Ever hear of knocking?"

"Oh please, like I haven't walked in on Alec with a girl before," Max scoffed.  "He's not exactly the shy type, you know."

"Then why are you so mad at me?"  Her older sister eyed Max narrowly.  "You're not jealous, are you?"

"He wishes," Max answered with a snort.  "Me and Alec are nothing like that."  In the back of her head the words mocked her, reminding her of similar ones once uttered about she and Logan.  "We're friends," she added defiantly.  "At least as much as I can be friends with someone who doesn't even tell me he's got a kid out there somewhere."

"We all have our secrets, Max," Brin said wearily.  "Especially about Manticore."

"We can't afford secrets anymore," Max snapped back.  "We are all in this together now, and one person's secrets could take everybody down."

"Words to live by, Max," Alec said as he reentered the living room.  "I've been thinking a lot about those lately.  Words, I mean."  He carefully closed the bedroom door behind him, but remained standing guard in front of it, while his eyes moved swiftly from one woman's set face to the other.  "So, what'd I miss?"

There was a distinct moment of silence before Brin cleared her throat and answered, "Oh, just a little chat on the importance of knocking."

Alec nodded to her slightly, mentally awarding her points for being the first one to think up a tactful retreat.  "Yeah, Logan hates when we do that to him.  I used to think it was pretty funny seeing him get all mad about it, but I'm starting to think he might be right, at least as far as teaching the munchkin some manners."  His gaze shifted to Max, communicating something deeper than his light words conveyed.  "I think we should give that knocking idea a whirl.  See what all the buzz is about."

"Sure."  Max tossed her hair over her shoulder and tried not to look as hurt as she felt.  "Yeah, 'cause I'd hate to walk in on you gettin' busy on the couch before your kid does."

Alec laughed, although inwardly he cringed at the image.  "I don't think seeing one kiss would have scarred her for life, Maxie.  After the stuff she's already been through... well, like our good buddy Mole would say: this is chump change."

He knew the words were a mistake as soon as they were out of his mouth, but it was too late to call them back.  As usual when he tried to deal with two women at the same time, smoothing one's ruffled feathers only served to set the other one on fire.

"Chump change?"  Brin smiled sourly at him.  "Funny, I had you pegged for a sweet talker, too.  My mistake."  

She marched past him, head held high, but Alec managed to grab her arm on the back swing and held on tight.  

"Brin, I didn't mean it like that," he said softly.  He tugged gently on her arm until she reluctantly turned around to face him.  "Thanks for the Scotch, and for the talk.  I can't say you changed my mind, but it means a lot that you tried."

She started to open her mouth to answer, but Alec laid a finger lightly across her lips as he took a step closer.  "I'd thank you for the kiss too," he added in a voice just above a whisper, "but I think we probably should wait on that until we don't have an audience."

Brin looked deep into his eyes to see if he really meant what he was saying, but it suddenly occurred to her that she really didn't know Alec well enough to do more than guess and hope.  That translated to trust; a trait not bred into Manticore progeny.  But it was one she was going to have to learn if she wanted this relationship, or her relationship with her sister, to survive.

"Okay," she whispered back, her reply creating the lightest of kisses on Alec's finger.

* * * * *

_Static.  Nothing but static._

Logan put his cell phone down next to his keyboard on the battered wooden desk, nervously tapping his finger on the plastic casing as he tried to plan out his next move.

He'd noticed the first signs of disturbance as soon as he sat down at his computer.  The printout from his intrusion detection software was showing several attempts to drill through his firewalls; nothing had gotten in, naturally, but the very fact that someone tried spoke volumes.  

The house itself showed no obvious signs of a break-in, although it was possible these people were just very good.  But outside they hadn't been quite so careful; when he'd taken an apparently casual stroll onto the porch he'd spied small traces of debris from the work they'd done on the phone lines.  

So he didn't use the phone, not the one in the house at least.  He'd used his cell phone to make the calls he needed, until White's men threw out some kind of jamming signal and that line of communication was cut.  

It was all compromised now, or soon would be; the trick would be to use that to their advantage.  White would know Alec planned to give up his daughter, and if White was the one who engineered her return that would have to come as a nasty surprise.  Logan could only hope it would be enough to make the agent lose his cool and act prematurely; it was their only real chance to find out his plan before it came down on all their heads.

With that thought in mind he made himself pick up the portable phone from the widow sill, leaving his cell on the desk.  Time to start making calls, the kind he hadn't planned on making for at least a week, if ever.  He didn't want to start shopping around for new parents for 49614 until he had to, not until it was clear that Alec wasn't going to change his mind.  Logan couldn't bear to raise that kind of false hope in good people, but he simply couldn't see another way out right now.  He could only hope that later, when this was all over and he could explain, his friends would understand all lies were told to save a little girl.

He only wished he could be sure what they were saving her from.  If White had her in his control and then let her go, there had to be more at stake than rounding up transgenics.  Then again, when wasn't there more to White than met the eye?

* * * * *

"Just what the hell were you thinking, Alec?"  Max had remained silent as Brin was leaving, but she turned on him almost the instant they were alone.  "Or should I ask what you were thinking with?"

"It was one kiss, Max, between two adults."  He raised his index finger and waved it in the air to emphasize his next point.  "Fully clothed adults, in case you hadn't noticed."

"Well thank God for that much," she grumbled.  "But it was still stupid, even by the laws of Alec-land."

In truth, Alec was beginning to think the same thing himself.  He was the first to admit that loneliness made him a little reckless sometimes, and all the time he'd spent today contemplating giving up the daughter it had taken so long to find had left him unusually vulnerable.

He'd be damned if he'd admit that to Max, though.

"Why?"  He threw up his hands as he sank down onto the sofa.  "Enlighten me, oh wise woman of love."

"Love?" she asked sharply.

He flushed as his hands fell to his side.  "You know what I meant.  Why is it so wrong for Brin and I to share one measly little kiss?"

"It didn't look measly, Alec."

"Well thanks for the good review, Maxie, but can you just cut to the chase?  Or do you not actually have a point to make beyond hassling me?"

"Fine."  She began restlessly pacing the room, much as Alec had done less than a half-hour before.  "You spend all this time the past couple of weeks trying to get me to see Brin's side, make me see that she's confused and hurting over what she did to Tinga.  Make me see that she's messed up and needs all this time and understanding."  She stopped pacing and wheeled around to confront him.  "Then on the day that you're completely flipping out, you grab onto her like she's suddenly the world's best anchor."

"I am not completely flipping out," he immediately protested.  A moment later he added in a quieter voice, "But maybe, just maybe, there might be a little something to the rest of what you said."

Max crossed her arms over her chest and stared down her nose at him.  "Oh, you mean the part where you used her?"

Alec quickly got to his feet, his guilt beginning to give way to anger.  "No, the part where she's not ready to be anybody's anchor.  If," he raised an eyebrow at Max, "someone was in the market for an anchor."

"Which you're not?" she challenged.

"I needed a friend to talk to," he said impatiently.  "Somebody who's done a few things she really, really would like to take back too."

She saw an opening and seized it with determination.  If it was Alec's new goal in life to come up with ways to wreck his future happiness, then her job description just expanded beyond the previous butt-saving limitations. 

"But you haven't done anything.  Not yet anyway."  

He looked at her in disbelief.  "You know that's not true."

"I'm not talking about Manticore, Alec; I'm talking about you."  Her voice was low and soft, and just a little wistful.  "No matter how much I bust your ass, I know how to tell the difference between what you want to do and what you did because you just wanted to stay alive."

"I did what I had to do."  He pondered the idea for a moment, rolling it over and over in his head to see it from all angles.  But the view never changed; it never had and it never would.  "You know I've told myself that a lot.  In fact, I've told you that a lot."  He eyed her speculatively.  "I just never thought you bought it.

"I think I started buying it the day I realized you didn't," she offered quietly.  "And maybe it helped that we both know there were worse things they could have done to you than re-indoctrination."

Zack was in both their minds, and Tinga.  But it still wasn't enough for Alec.

"I can't break it out that way anymore, Max; I wish I could.  Life would sure be a lot simpler."

"Don't screw this up.  Doesn't get much simpler than that."  She pointed to 49614's closed bedroom door.  "Your little girl is still right there in that room, not with some strange family god knows where learning to milk chickens."

"You really think a lot of Logan's friends, don't you?"

"Don't change the subject," she snapped, fighting the usual thought-derailing effect his sarcasm had on her.  "She's still here and you haven't done anything more than yap about some stupid plan to give her up.  She doesn't even know, and we... Logan and Joshua and me... we'll never tell her.  It's done."  She mimicked tossing something away.  "Over.  I won't even bring it up the next time you get a dumb idea."

He sank back down onto the sofa, the energy that had fueled his anger suddenly deserting him.

"As tempting of an offer as that is, Max... pass."

Max sat down next to him on the sofa, turning sideways so that she could face him.  She'd tried wheedling him, and she'd tried bullying him, but nothing seemed to make a dent.  She was obviously going to have to try the one thing she found hardest to express, especially to Alec.  

Simple compassion.

"If you do this, you're going to hate yourself, Alec, and I can't stand around and watch you do it.  I'm not saying it wouldn't be right for somebody else, but I've seen you with her and I know you can't do this without ripping yourself apart."

"I'll be okay, Max.  I'm just about indestructible."

His smile was as quiet and empty as his voice; if she hadn't been looking straight at him, Max never would have believed it was Alec speaking. 

"Sure," she joked nervously, "as long as I'm around to save your ass."

"Do me a favor; don't save me now."

She shrugged and turned up her palms.  "Can't help it.  It's like a reflex by now."

Alec leaned towards her, all pretense of casual bantering at an end.  "I asked you once before to leave me alone.  You didn't, and I'm grateful.  But this situation is nothing like that one.  I'm telling you to stay out of it and I mean it."

"Alec..."

"Back off, Max."

When she first met Alec, Max thought the only time he got serious was when he tried to kill someone.  Actually sometimes even then he let his sarcastic side get the better of him.  But she'd seen a lot of changes in Alec over the past year and she knew there were times when the jokes, and the smiles, and what Logan liked to call the 'happy-go-lucky sociopath' demeanor, all fell away, leaving the darkness and confusion Joshua had seen so clearly from the beginning.

This was one of those times.

"I can't," Max said softly as she slid off of the sofa and stood up.  Looking down at her one-time enemy, she tried to remember when exactly it was that he morphed into one of her best friends.  Into family.  "You wouldn't let me drown; how am I supposed to watch you go under without even trying to save you?"

He reached out and grabbed her wrist, his fingers biting into the soft flesh.  She was forcing him to be honest, not something he would easily forget.  "If warning you won't work, then Max... I'm begging you.  This is already taking all I've got; I can't be fighting you on top of that."

She gently but firmly pulled her arm from his grasp.  Then to Alec's surprise, Max bent down and dropped a kiss on the top of his head, just as he had done to his little girl when he put her to bed.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

Sorry for what he had to do or what she would have to, Alec couldn't be sure.  He couldn't ask her, either; Max was gone before he could find the words.

* * * * *

To Be Continued 


	5. Chapter 5

**__**

In the Shadows

Part 5

By Gem

Joshua had walked into Alec's new home as confidently as he would have entered Max's apartment or Logan's, as easily as Alec would have walked into Joshua's room in Terminal City just two days ago. Friends didn't bother with things like knocking, especially friends who'd been invited to come over. And yet having made himself that much at home, he stopped dead in the middle of Alec's living room, suddenly made nervous by the sight of his former roommate being domestic.

"Josh, hey man," Alec looked up from the table he was clearing to acknowledge his friend's entrance. "Thanks for getting over here so quickly." 

Joshua thought fast. Alec didn't look embarrassed by his current chore, at least not enough to stop, so obviously this was not the reason he had been called. He tried to sound casual as he fished around for clues. 

"Some... thing wrong with little monkey?" 

"No, no, she's fine. She's in her room playing." 

Alec dumped the stacked dishes into a bin he'd found in the break room, and gently stood the silverware up in a tall glass. One chore down, seventeen or so to go, he thought to himself. Taking care of a small child entailed a lot more work and time than he had ever imagined; the whole process of bathing had taken an hour alone, and ended in him taking two showers in one morning. 

"I just need someone to watch her for a little while. I have to go out."

The tall transgenic looked pleased, and surprised. "You want Joshua to... baby-sit?"

"That's the plan, buddy." Alec smiled at his friend's obvious delight. "If you don't mind," he added to be polite, although Joshua's face made the gesture somewhat pointless.

Joshua immediately began planning the morning's activities. "We have fun. Paint."

"Yeah, painting's good." The response had come without thought; a habit Alec was already learning could be dangerous. "Wait, no, that paint you use – it really stinks. She probably shouldn't be breathing it."

It took a moment for the irony to strike him; his daughter was genetically immune to some of the deadliest toxins and diseases known to man, but oil-based paint he had to worry about.

"Read books to little monkey?" It was Joshua's second favorite hobby, and one he would gladly pass on to his newly acquired 'niece.'

"Perfect." Alec pushed aside the problem of what there was for Joshua to read to the child; that was the babysitter's problem, and one he was far better able to deal with than Alec. "And, you know, thanks. I really appreciate this."

"Alec need..." Joshua sought for the correct expression, and then seized it with a triumphant smile, "space?"

"What I need is a car." It hurt to admit such disloyalty to his beloved motorcycle, but Alec had no choice. "Getting out to pay the detective is no big on my bike, but then I'm going to have to borrow Logan's car, because a certain young lady has some serious shopping to do." He quirked a smile. "Thanks to that fire she only came with the clothes on her back, and they had the tags cut out. I don't even know her size."

Joshua thrust out his hands, leaving about two-and-a-half feet of space between his palms. "Little," he suggested.

"Uh, yeah, thanks, but I think I need to be a little more on target." Alec patted Joshua consolingly on the shoulder. "Right now she's wearing an old T-shirt of Dalton's, minus a couple of inches off the bottom. But she's not real happy with the fashion statement. Which reminds me," he smacked his palm against his forehead, "I owe him a shirt too while I'm out."

"Alec gone long?"

"Don't worry; I won't take up too much of your time, buddy. Since I don't know her size, I'm going to have to take her with me. And," he added as he began sweeping the crumbs from the table into the bin, "I think I'm gonna need a woman's opinion too, even though every masculine bone in my body shudders at the thought of asking."

"Take Little Fella?" Joshua's innocent question turned sly as he added, "Or Brin?"

"Neither one, believe me." Alec's figurative shudder became literal at the thought of one woman finding out he'd asked the other. "They ran into each other here last night and it was not a good scene. Which," he turned up his hands in supplication, "makes absolutely no sense to me. I mean Brin and I aren't like that." 

He thought of the previous night's kiss and almost reworded his statement, but something held him back. Whatever the kiss, and the conversation that preceded it, had meant was yet to be determined, but Joshua was not the one he needed to talk it out with.

"And Max and I..." Alec paused again on the edge of uncertain territory. "We're not... I mean hey, until she broke up with Logan, she always looked at me like I was something she scraped off her bike tire. And even now, after the siege and all, we're still..." he shrugged, "we're just not like that. But let me tell you, there was enough cat DNA on parade here last night to build your own hairball."

Joshua nodded sagely, one man of the world to another. "Sisters."

"You said it, bro. That's why I'm going to beg Original Cindy to give me a hand. I am guaranteed not to get into trouble with her, at least as long as I don't talk." He grinned, thinking of the many and varied ways he knew to annoy his former coworker. "Or, you know, breathe too loudly. Or too often."

The tall transgenic shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He was, of course, sympathetic to Alec's situation but time was wasting and he was impatient to assume his new duties. "Little monkey need new clothes. You leave soon?"

"Soon enough. I just have to wash out these dishes and then I'm outta here. Can you go in and play with her while I'm down the hall?"

Joshua needed no further prompting; he grabbed a book from the nearly empty shelves and sped into 49614's room, ready to assume responsibility for his newest, and smallest, friend.

* * * * *

Ames White whistled as he strode down the long corridor towards the communications hub for his latest, and greatest, operation. He couldn't get over the difference a day could make in his life. Yesterday at this time his plans were still only that: plans. Today he was already well on his way to getting Ray back and putting an end to the migraine that was 452. In a few more days the time without his son would only be a memory.

His good mood lasted all the way down the hall, but died a quick death shortly after he entered his command center. Things were simply too quiet to be encouraging. The agents he'd assigned to hack into the computer in his father's old house were lounging in a corner drinking coffee and talking baseball, while the agent who was supposed to be monitoring phone calls from the same residence was leafing through an old issue of 'People' magazine.

"I'm so glad I could give you all such a nice little break in your routine," White sneered as he strode into the room. "I wouldn't want to wear you out with all that listening."

The agents scrambled to their feet, quickly shoving coffee cups and magazines out of sight. Special Agent White was known as a man with little sense of humor, and what sense he had was not reputed to be particularly kind. The chances of him understanding the concept of friendly conversation were roughly about as good as a transgenic's odds for being accepted at the FBI academy.

"We're waiting for the subject to resume making phone calls, sir," the newest, and least cautious, agent said smartly. "Until then..." he shrugged expressively.

"Until then I expect to see you doing some work," White snarled. "Your assignment was to crawl into this guy's hard drive and sift through it for something useful. Whether or not he also uses a telephone, ham radio or lights the house on fire to send up smoke signals should be irrelevant to you."

"We already tried pinging his system, sir," one of the other agents admitted, casting a quelling glance at his overly chatty coworker. "No dice. This guy's got firewalls upon firewalls – we were lucky to get out before he caught us."

"And you're sure you didn't get caught?"

Survival instinct kicked in, prompting a crisp, confident, and more than a little optimistic, "Yes sir!" 

White ran his hand over his short, dark hair and sighed as he contemplated his staff. He needed to regain control of this conversation, before these bozos started losing sight of the mission. "Fine, so we can't get through to his computer. That still leaves notes of the previous conversations to be transcribed."

The agent stationed at the phone tap pulled out a small sheaf of papers from behind her computer monitor. "Right here, sir. 

White snatched them from her hand and began leafing through, becoming progressively more agitated as he read each succeeding page. The junior agents shared nervous glances as they awaited his reaction; they were all well aware of the contents of the transcripts, and none of them had any doubts about the magnitude of the explosion yet to come.

"This is wrong," White said loudly when he reached the last page. "This has got to be wrong." He threw the sheaf of papers onto an empty desk and advanced menacingly on the agent who had transcribed them. "I want you to go back over your tapes, transcribe them again, and this time get it right."

"Sir, they are right." The most senior of White's subordinates stepped up to take the heat. "We all heard the conversations as Agent Lauria was transcribing them."

"So you honestly expect me to believe that X5-494 has spent over a year trying to find this kid only to hand her off to someone else two days later? That's crazy," White said flatly. 

"Agent White, sir, you can listen to the tapes," Agent Lauria offered. "This man on the phone... he doesn't identify himself... but he seems to be dealing with friends. We ran the names and numbers through some databases after we traced the calls, and all these people have been on lists at two or three adoption agencies for at least a year. Unless this guy's got a sick sense of humor, or he's somehow stumbled across more than one female toddler in the last 12 hours, 494 really is planning on giving up the little girl."

White opened his mouth to roar, and then choked back his instinct. Losing control meant handing it over to the mutants, and that was not a plan he was prepared to carry out. He drew a few deep, harsh breaths through his nose and then growled, "Just great. We give her to him on a silver platter and he passes her off like day old bread. Can these freaks possibly screw up my life anymore?"

"Sir?" Otto hovered uncertainly in the doorway, something he found himself doing quite frequently these days. "Is there anything I can do to help?"

White motioned impatiently to his assistant to be quiet; he needed to think and he needed to do it fast. He was not going to let himself be outwitted by a bunch of genetically engineered jokes his father left as a legacy, not in this lifetime, anyway. 

"Okay, okay, we have a problem, but we can still spin it our way." He began to pace, visualizing the revised plan as he spoke. "So far all we have is hearsay from an unknown source. What we need to do is put a scare into our new daddy, just to get a handle on his real feelings here. With any luck we can also convince him, temporarily at least, that he's the only one who can protect his little bundle of joy."

"But how do we do that, sir? They're shut up in Terminal City; we can't get to them there."

White smiled for the first time since he'd walked into the room. "Otto, surely you didn't think I was counting on luck to draw them out into the open when I first came up with this plan? Leave nothing to chance; that's the way to get the job done."

"So how do we get to her?"

"The same way you get to any woman's heart, Otto. Take her shopping."

* * * * *

Max gripped the doorknob firmly in her hand and started to twist, not remembering until the last second that new rules were now in place for Alec's apartment. She released the doorknob as though it was on fire and moved her hand up to knock on the door, then was stopped again by the sound of running water down the hall.

She strolled down the hall and into the former break room, stopping in the doorway to silently observe Alec's newfound domesticity for a few minutes before she made her presence known. He was washing dishes in the metal double sink, his back turned towards her, and his attention apparently split between a stubborn bit of crust on a plate and the tune he was whistling. Of all the strange things Max had witnessed in her life, Alec washing dishes had to be near the top of the list.

"You gonna help or just take notes?" Alec finally asked, not bothering to turn around.

"Take notes." She pushed herself off of the doorjamb she had been leaning against and strolled over to seat herself on the counter next to the sink. "I'm just aquiver at seeing this side of you, Alec. You can't blame me for not wanting to spoil the picture by putting myself in it."

"Well, I may not have pulled a lot of k.p. during my life," he admitted, "but Manticore really knew how to inspire a guy to keep things in order. I mean the ten-mile hikes barefoot through a Wyoming winter were one thing, but who wants to be brainwashed into picking up your socks?"

The smile he flashed made Max a part of Alec's memories in a way she hadn't felt since the bombshell of 49614's existence had been dropped. But remembering what had broken the link only stiffened her resolve to keep anything else in her world from going sideways. 

"Speaking of brains, where's yours?"

To the casual listener her tone might have sounded conversational, even teasing, but Alec knew her better; he could hear the angry edge beneath the banter. With a sigh he pulled his hands from the soapy water and shook them off.

"Okay, Max, what did I do now?"

She waved a hand around the break room. "I see you being all Suzie Homemaker and that's great. I mean you put on a good show." Her hand fell to her hip, fingers digging into bone as she fought off the urge to wrap that same hand around his neck and twist. "What I'm not seeing is the audience. How could you be so stupid as to leave a kid that small alone? How could even you be so irresponsible?"

Alec reached behind her to grab a dishtowel. "She's with Joshua."

"Oh." Max dipped her head, hoping the long dark hair slipping over her shoulders would shield her burning cheeks as the bubble of her righteous anger abruptly burst. "You could have said that when I walked in, you know."

"You mean, 'hey Max, how are you, I am fine and by the way I have provided adequate care for my child while I am not physically in the same room with her'?" He shot her a sidelong glance through his eyelashes as he dried his hands. "Something like that?"

"You're just so new to all this," she complained as she forced herself to face him. "And it's not like I'm any big expert or anything, but..."

"But you care what happens to her," he finished quietly. "I know that, and it... it means a lot to me. Look, I know I don't know what I'm doing here, Max, but you have to believe I'm thinking about it pretty much ever second that I'm awake." He rubbed one hand over his red eyes. "Which I'm guessing is going to be basically all the time for a while."

"So, umm, Joshua is with her right now?" Max slid off the counter. "Do you think he needs some help?"

Alec began drying off the plates, gently placing each one on top of the other on the counter after he was done. His care, in this case, was not motivated so much by a desire to protect the dishes as a devout wish to avoid looking Max in the eye. "If he does, then I asked the wrong man to baby-sit today."

Max had started walking towards the door, but Alec's words stopped her short. "You asked Joshua to baby-sit?"

He still didn't look up. "Yeah."

"But..." she floundered for a way to make her question not sound like a complaint. "Did you think I wouldn't do it after last night?"

Alec couldn't look at her now; no matter how much sense the argument made to his own ears, he knew the truth would hurt Max. "No, I, uh... actually I just thought he'd be the best choice."

Max raised her eyebrows and pretended she didn't feel his words cutting into her. "Excuse me? Since when did Joshua get his child care merit badge?"

"None of us knows anything about kids, except maybe Gem. But that's not why I asked him anyway." He met her eyes reluctantly, wincing a little at the hurt he saw reflected in their dark depths. "I have to go out for a little while, and I need to know she'll be safe when I'm not around."

He didn't come out and say it, but his implication was clear. It was, in fact, so painfully clear she felt like Alec had punched her, except that no physical blow had ever taken her breath away quite so thoroughly.

"You think I wouldn't protect her?" she choked out when she finally regained the power of speech. "You actually think I would let something happen to that little girl?"

"I think..." he sighed deeply. "I think you've been hanging out with Logan too much."

"I what?" she sputtered. Whatever she had been expecting, it had not been this.

"Or maybe that's why you two hooked up in the first place," he continued over her protest. "You have this blind spot, Max, same as him – you see the good in people. You want to see it, and if it doesn't exist you still think you see it. I don't know how or why; I mean you'd think even just ten years at Manticore would've knocked it out of you." He shook his head. "But it's still in there and I can't risk it getting in the way of my kid's safety."

She heard the words, but her dazed mind couldn't begin to process them. His whole idea was insane. No, Alec was insane.

"And Joshua's the savage here? Are you even listening to what you're saying?"

Alec shrugged. "I'm not saying he's a savage. But he's a realist; he sees people for who they really are, not who he wants them to be. I need someone who sees White as he is."

"I know what White is," she said through gritted teeth. "He's a monster, a real one. I wouldn't even let him near her, and if he tried to hurt her..."

He gave up the pretense that he was paying any attention to his domestic chores and laid the dishtowel down on top of the stack of dry plates.

"Max, hold up. I'm not saying it's a bad thing to see the good in people. It, uh," Alec looked away for an instant, "in fact it reminds me of someone I used to know. But even taking the time to look for it in the wrong person can sometimes get you killed." He turned back to face his friend, maybe his best friend, suddenly implacable in his judgment of her. "You look at Ames White and a part of you can't help but see a guy who's been turning the world upside down to find his missing son. Joshua looks at the same guy and sees a psycho who let some freaks poison his son on the off-chance the kid could survive and join the family cult."

"I don't..." she began, but Alec wouldn't let her finish.

"You see a guy who let his wife live until he really, really had to kill her," he continued stonily. "Joshua looks at good old Ames and sees a guy who killed an innocent defenseless girl just to stir up a revolution."

She didn't know how she was supposed to respond. He was rejecting her help, again, but this time he was doing it because he thought she was too nice, too good. He actually thought she was more of a marshmallow than Joshua, and while part of her was angry for his lack of trust, another part of her was unwillingly touched that Alec thought there was some fragment of her innocence left untarnished by Manticore.

"So what do you see when you look at White?" she asked softly.

Alec smiled crookedly at her, as though he pitied the naïveté that had prompted her question. 

"Oh, don't go by me, Max. I'm the class cynic. Or maybe I'm just the class bigot." He cocked his head to the side, his smile turning into a mock frown. "No matter how hard I try, I can't seem to get past the cloven hoofs and those bright red horns."

"You honestly believe I would let White hurt her because I'm too stupid to know he's the bad guy?"

All pretense of humor, dark or otherwise, vanished from Alec's face as though it had never been. "I think you would hesitate, and Joshua wouldn't. I honestly believe that if it came down to it you would hesitate because you thought you could find some tiny piece of humanity in White that could be appealed to. And in the same instant that you hesitated... White would win."

Max didn't know how to make him see how wrong he was. It had taken her a long time to learn to trust Alec, but it had never occurred to her that he might not trust her in return. Yet it seemed like everywhere she'd turned in the past 24 hours, she discovered yet one more way he had to show her just that.

"Come on, Max," Alec said abruptly, pushing himself away from the counter. "I got places to go and things to do." He winced at the mental image that immediately assaulted him. "Just wish I didn't have to do them driving the Aztec sacrifice."

* * * * *

"Sir, this plan... it seems a little risky."

'Risky' was the politest term Otto could think to use; 'insane' was closer to his real opinion, but he would have to be equally nuts to be honest with his boss at this point. And he knew the real score, too; he knew what White was actually after. If he thought the plan was crazy, knowing what was truly at stake, what must the other agents, who believed this was just another mission, think of the idea?

"It's not risky, Otto; it's bold. It's creative. It's inspired." White was beaming; he couldn't believe he hadn't thought of this before. 

"Maybe we should just move straight to Stage 3," Otto suggested, doing his best to hide his wince at the thought. He wasn't looking forward to Stage 3 either, but he had to keep the goal in mind.

"No, it's too soon. And at this point we're not even sure it will work; that's why we need to test the waters." White looked around the room for approbation, but he settled for the resignation and slight fear he could perceive. "What better way to up the ante than with a little pre-game hostage situation?"

"But sir, the civilians... children, sir; it will be a children's store. We lost control of the fire at the orphanage and there were... casualties." 

Otto closed his eyes for an instant, trying to shut out the images he had seen on the news the night before, and in his morning pile of surveillance photos. It didn't help, though; the ravages that fire had created fed on darkness. 

Opening his eyes both literally and figuratively, he tried again to appeal to White's professional instincts. He knew it was no use trying to tap into the man's better nature; it was becoming increasingly clear that White's humanity began and ended with his son.

"Do we really want to chance that happening again? The chance of exposure alone..."

White looked surprised, although he had expected an objection. He just found it hard to believe his subordinate could still be caught up in yesterday's news. 

"That fire getting out of hand was an accident, Otto; just a freak accident." He clapped his assistant on the back, adopting a placating tone. "Maybe it's just the way I phrased it, Otto; maybe 'hostage situation' is overstating the case. All they need to do track 494 and the girl using the implant, and when they reach a nice, quiet kid's store, pretend to rob it. A little gun-waving, maybe a few carefully aimed shots fired overhead... where's the danger in that?"

Otto couldn't begin to list the problems he could see arising from White's plan, but he also knew the set to his boss' jaw. When White had that look on his face, and that certain mild, perfectly rational tone in his voice... the one favored by so many serial killers on the nightly news... there was nothing to do but hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

"How many agents are we going to need, sir?" Otto asked, trying to keep his voice as calm as White's. There was no need to let the rest of the agents know they were all going to die until they were all actually going to die.

"Four... No, better make that five." White nodded at his currently unoccupied hackers. "Those three clowns can make themselves useful, and then grab two more... doesn't matter who. Two of them will actually go inside to stage the robbery, and the other three should be stationed outside to drag them out after 494 disables them. He'll get the hell out before the sector police arrive, so we shouldn't have to worry about our men getting nabbed for the robbery."

"And if we do get caught by the police?" one of the hackers asked warily.

"Well, if you give them my name I'll deny I ever heard of you," White assured him with a breezy smile. "So my advice? Don't get caught."

"So we're just going to run in, grab some money out of the till, threaten the transgenic and let him kick our asses?" The agent was talking to White, but looking imploringly to Otto as the last hope for reason.

"You're not going to threaten 494," White snapped. "I swear, it's like I'm talking to myself here. Threaten the kid, _the kid_; you got that? Kick start 494's parental instincts, and then let him get away. Which," he added almost as an afterthought, "will probably require letting him kick your asses. Just, uh, try not to let him kill you. It would create way too many questions."

* * * * *

Logan heard the piano music as soon as he walked in the door. It took him a moment to realize it was the same song he'd heard the day before, undoubtedly produced by the same musician; he only wished he knew why it had seemed familiar then and now.

He stood for a moment in the living room before bowing to the inevitable and descending the staircase to the basement. There he found Alec, as he'd known he would, although seeing Original Cindy sifting through a box of magazines in the corner beneath a window came as a surprise.

"You know," Logan said as he took the last step down and rounded the corner, "there's something about that song that just seems so..."

And like that the song was over, Alec smoothly segueing into another tune without hesitation. "Logan, how ya doin'? Can I borrow the car?"

As usual Alec's voice betrayed little of his true emotions, but Logan was learning to read between the lines. Whatever that song was... and eventually he would remember the name... it meant something to Alec he had no intention of sharing right now. Harping on the point would only create problems on top of the ones they already had in abundance. Better to take the safe road, Logan silently decided.

"Now how did this happen?" he appealed to Original Cindy, feigning a bewildered look. "He becomes a father and yet I'm the one handing out the car keys."

"Man has a way of turning the rules upside down and upside yo' head," Original Cindy agreed with an emphatic nod of her head. "Supposed to be part of his charm."

"It is a large part of my charm," Alec said stoutly, his fingers still flying over the piano keys. "People feel good about saying 'yes' to me because they're being both cooperative and defiant at the same time."

"Scary part is, they didn't just let him make babies," Original Cindy drawled as she strolled over to stand next to the piano. "They asked him to. Or did you volunteer for once?" 

Alec stiffened. He didn't usually let Original Cindy's jibes get to him, but he was feeling a little raw right now, especially about his Manticore days. "I didn't do anything in that breeding program. Ask Max; she'll tell you."

Original Cindy was surprised by the sharpness of his tone, but she ignored Logan's warning glance. She wasn't seriously trying to wound Alec; Max had, in fact, told her enough about the breeding program and Alec's part in it to know that there were no debts owed in this area. But teasing Alec was second nature by now; it was the way Original Cindy communicated. If the boy didn't know that by now, she told herself, he just hadn't been paying attention. 

"You didn't do nothin' because Max didn't let you do nothin'." She planted her hand on her hip and smirked down at him. "You try to do somethin' and my girl woulda made sure you never do anythin' again."

Alec stopped playing and turned slowly on the bench to look her straight in the eye. Original Cindy had never bought any of his lines before; he was pretty sure she could tell he wasn't shining her on now. "You think I went into that cell trying to charm the pants off of her?" he asked quietly. "You honestly believe I'd risk giving Renfro another kid of mine?"

She suddenly realized she'd gone a step too far. It was something she'd never thought possible to do with Alec; he'd never given her reason to believe he had enough depth to strike bone.

"Hey, boo, now you know I didn't mean..."

"Guys, hey," Logan said hastily, "remember me? The one with the keys?" He dangled the key ring in the air, breathing a silent sigh of relief when both sets of eyes turned towards him. "Why do you need the car anyway? Or don't I get to ask?"

Original Cindy gratefully seized the out. "We goin' shopping for the new girl in Alec's life. Child ain't got but the clothes on her back, and no way a sister can live like that for long, even if she only 2."

"I could have brought the car over," Logan said, looking strangely at Alec. "It's not like you're shy or anything Alec; why didn't you just call and ask?"

"I kind of figured Max wouldn't like it if I dragged you back to Poison Central," Alec explained. He slid around on the bench to face the piano again, but he only tapped at random keys rather than trying to play anything in particular. "She's mad enough as it is; even I'm not crazy enough to stoke that fire."

Logan was tempted to ask if anything new happened after he left the night before, but he decided at the last instant he really didn't want to know. Max was an adult and so was Alec; at some point in time, hopefully soon, they had to start learning to treat each other as such without Logan running interference. 

"It, uh, probably is a good thing you didn't call," he said instead. "White's tapped the phone."

Original Cindy stared at him, and then quickly shifted her attention to Alec when the transgenic's hands slammed down on the piano, creating a discordant crash that resounded against the stone walls of the basement.

"Now why would White be keepin' his ear to your door?" she asked. "You think he got his nose twitchin' about the next gen?"

Alec ignored her. "You're sure?" he asked tersely, staring down at his hands splayed out on the keys.

"Pretty sure. They definitely tried to get into my computer, and the cell is blocked. Now there's a hum on the regular phone."

"Great." Alec stood up abruptly and stalked over to stare up at the grey sky through one of the high windows, knocking over the piano bench on his way with his uncharacteristically jerky movements. "So this really wasn't just one big happy coincidence. Well hey, who wants a family reunion anyway?"

"I didn't think you were in the market for one," Logan said slowly. 

Alec turned sharply on his heel, reminding Logan of the predators' DNA that ran through his veins. "Do you see why now? Do you finally get it?"

"Hey, easy; I'm on your side, remember? Or at least I'm on your daughter's side, and I'm trusting that's the same thing."

Alec forced himself to calm down, even if it was only fractionally. Logan was right; he wasn't the enemy. Alec wasn't sure if they could actually be called friends, but at least he knew the man was too much of a do-gooder to consciously try to hurt him.

'Consciously,' unfortunately, being the key word.

"How much did you say before you figured out White was drooling into the other end?"

"Give me a little credit; I figured it out before I said anything." Logan tried to look offended, but in truth he didn't blame Alec. Had their positions been reversed, he would have thought the same thing. "So I made a few calls, and told some very careful truths that I hope... that I believe... will shake White up, and maybe make him do something stupid."

"So we're trying to force him into doing something rash and impulsive and really, really dumb? White?" Alec scratched his head and frowned. "Okay, but I thought I was supposed to be the one with the crazy plans that Max needs to rescue me from. You're the one with the maps and the life insurance."

"Why do you think I buy the insurance?" Logan countered with a small smile.

"Can I just say Original Cindy don't know what the hell you two are jammin' about?" Original Cindy broke in. "But if it means we get to take a big old meat hook to that rattlesnake White and hang him up by his..."

Logan quickly raised his hand to ward off the image her words were creating in his mind. "Please, stop. I'm begging you from the bottom of my... heart."

She shook her head at his squeamishness, but forbore from commenting on it. "All I'm sayin' is count me in."

Alec blew a sigh out between his teeth. This was all getting seriously out of control, and every Manticore-generated molecule in his body was scrambling to find some area of his life where he still had the sense that he was in command.

"Right now, god help me, I need to count on your fashion sense." He swiftly crossed the room and snatched the keys still dangling from Logan's fingertips. "Thanks, Dad. We'll be home by dawn."

Original Cindy trailed after Alec up the stairs, protesting all the way. "Now what did you mean about Original Cindy's clothes? I just know you wouldn't have the nerve to diss a sister to her face when you already be askin' for her help."

"I'm saying no leopard skin, O.C. Also no zebra, no lizard, no snake... nothing that looks like it used to have a previous occupant."

"This child gonna have no style," she grumbled. "No style at all."

* * * * * *

Two dark and nondescript government-issue surveillance sedans pulled up to the curb one block down from a store in downtown Seattle with the unlikely name of "Tailored Tots." The tracking device implanted in 49614 had led the NSA agents on a winding course through the city, featuring brief stops at a number of local children's stores. This store, however, was the first one where the subjects had spent more time inside than it took for the agents to find a parking place. From this White's highly trained operatives determined the amusing, but unfortunately useless fact that X5-494 was a little choosy when it came to apparel.

They gave the transgenic ten minutes before they moved in, just to be sure he wasn't simply window shopping. At ten minutes plus one second, Special Agents Victor, Yosh and Andrews slipped out of their car and moved unobtrusively down the street towards Tailored Tots. When they reached the alley next to the store Andrews turned, preparing to cover the rear entrance. Victor and Yosh grimly slid ski masks over their heads and darted in the front door a minute later.

The next fifteen minutes would forever remain a blur to the agents involved, a jumble of shouting and gunfire and the sound of breaking bones hitting breaking walls. When they pooled their memories much later, in the quiet and safety of the NSA infirmary, the story that emerged was still only a partially coherent narrative.

Special Agent Victor had fired the first round at a wall, as instructed; on that much the faux robbers were in agreement. And X5-494 had reacted to the shot with both speed and ferocity, two more points that stood out in all minds. But the questions of who fired the next six shots that took out the alarms and surveillance equipment, who reduced the computer that spewed out receipts into a pile of twisted metal and who barricaded the store's patrons and staff into the dressing rooms with racks of clothing remained mysteries.

The question of who threw the three agents in the store out onto the street, via the front wall, was of course not really a question at all. Special Agent Andrews only considered it lucky that Special Agents Kiruk and Macleod were able to drag their unconscious and bleeding compatriots to the safety of the car before anyone police made it to the scene.

Ames White didn't call it luck, naturally. To him it was all part of the plan, a plan that succeeded better than he could have dreamed.

"We got him, Otto." White rubbed his hands together with glee as he paced around the infirmary where his agents were being stitched and bandaged. "He wouldn't tear these guys up like that if he wasn't attached to the little mutant. This is just perfect."

Otto wearily surveyed the piles of bloody clothing on the metal carts in each cubicle, the rings of plaster spatters on the tile floor from numerous casts being shaped, the glare of fluorescent lights bouncing off a seemingly never-ending banner of white bandages swathing three of the NSA's best agents.

"Yes sir. Perfect sir," he murmured dutifully. 

"Oh lighten up, Otto." White made a face at his unduly serious assistant. "So there were casualties; it's all part of the game. The important thing is we've got a bead on 494's mindset, even if these bozos did almost blow things by sending too many men in at once."

"Sir, when I heard the commotion in the store I felt I should..." Andrews began, but White gestured for him to be quiet.

"Do I look like I care about your feelings, Agent?"

"No sir."

White nodded briskly. "Nice grasp of reality."

Otto almost choked on the slightly hysterical laugh that was trying to force its way out of his throat. _Reality._ As though his boss was even on speaking terms with the concept these days.

* * * * *

Max was not designed for a desk job. Her DNA, like the rest of the X5's, was skewed towards fighting battles, not picking up the field afterwards. Yet since she had come to Terminal City, more and more of her time had been taken up with the day-to-day details of running a large base camp. Today it was the blueprints for the SeaTech Research Inc. that demanded her attention as she tried to figure out a way to restart the central air conditioning without blowing the whole power grid. Since the building was now known as the Icebox due to the large concentration of Arctic Division transgenics living there, the need for such power was becoming urgent. But when Alec strode into headquarters with his daughter in his arms and Original Cindy hard on his heels Max quickly pushed the paperwork to the side and got up to find out what was wrong.

There was urgent, and then there was urgent. 

"You did the right thing, Boo," Original Cindy was saying to Alec's stiff back when Max caught up with them. "She's fine; we all doin' fine. It's all good."

"What's all good?" Max asked, glancing worriedly from Alec to Original Cindy and back again. 

Alec spun around before Original Cindy could answer, his face displaying a depth of anger Max had never seen from him before.

"She could have been killed," he hissed at Original Cindy. "White's men must be waiting just outside the perimeter and I never even saw them until it was almost too late."

"White?" Max asked sharply. "You saw him? He fired on you?"

Neither Alec nor Original Cindy paid Max any attention; they were too focused on the argument that had begun almost the moment they ran out of the ruined clothing store.

"You can't know they were his boys," Original Cindy protested. She held out her hands, palms upward, in a silent appeal for reason in the universe, if not from Man. "They didn't have no little stun guns with them; those were plain old 'I need some cash and I need it now so just give it here' guns. And if they were working for White, why they try some dumb ass hold-up on the side? You think he don't pay them enough, so they try to collect some on their own while they out collecting you?"

Max tried again to be heard. "There was a robbery?"

"I think it was a set-up," Alec said quietly. The darkness had faded from his face, leaving behind a blank mask that was somehow even more unnerving than the raw anger it replaced. "They weren't looking for money; they were looking for me, and for her. The rest was just smoke and mirrors."

Original Cindy shook her head, almost wishing he were right. Life would be a lot simpler if only bad guys with missions and targets were allowed to be violent. "You really think bad things, they don't just happen?"

"I think they happen all the time," he answered grimly. "I used to make them happen, remember?"

"But White, you think he need to go through all those hoops just to hang that pretty little head of yours on his wall? Alec, he want you, he take you; man ain't got much more poetry in his soul than that, and he got no reason to need more."

"Just hold it," Max snapped before Alec could reply. She inserted herself between her friends, with one hand on Original Cindy's shoulder and the other on Alec's, and tried to find a jumping-off point in the conversation she had just overheard. "Someone had better tell me what's going on here fast, before I have to do a little gratuitous violence myself."

Alec sighed heavily and shifted 49614 to his other shoulder. The child accepted the move without a sound, as she had accepted everything since the moment the 'robbers' burst into the clothing store. It should have made things easier for Alec, not having to deal with a hysterical child, but instead it only fueled the rage he felt in equal parts towards Manticore and White. One had trained her from birth to exhibit this stoicism, and the other would take full and base advantage of it, given half a chance.

"We were at a kid's store," he began slowly, each word dragging memories to the forefront of his mind he would spend the rest of his life trying to hide from. "We'd been in there maybe ten minutes when a couple guys came running in and pretended to rob the place."

"They did try to rob the place," Original Cindy protested. "Would have too, if someone hadn't gone all super soldier on their asses."

"Yeah, except I wasn't fighting some street kids; these guys were trained in combat maneuvers." Alec looked somberly at Max. "They weren't Familiars, or if they were then they were seriously holding back. But the moves they were pulling they didn't learn holding up liquor stores."

"You think they were White's legit team?" Max asked. "But why would they pull a bonehead play like armed robbery just to get to you? They could have waited 5 minutes more and caught you on the way out. Snatch and run; no one would ever have noticed you getting pulled into their car. Or if they did, White's men have badges to flash along with those guns. Nobody would have said a word."

Original Cindy nodded emphatically. "She got you there. Just don't make sense to do what they did if all they was after was you and not money."

Alec ran his free hand through his dark blond hair. "I know it doesn't," he admitted. "But I know who they were; I know it in my gut, and all the logic in the world isn't going to change that."

Max watched him silently for a minute, trying to gauge the depth of his certainty. "So where does that leave us?" she finally asked. "Do we send guards with you when you go out? Or are you planning on never leaving Terminal City again?"

"You got a better idea?" he asked dryly.

She smiled brightly. "We could kill him. Something really, really painful. And kind of lingering, you know?"

"I said 'better,' not 'more fun'," he reminded her. 

"What do you say we beat him at his own game?" Logan suggested as she strolled over to join them. "I've got a plan if anyone is interested."

"Logan!" Max stared at him in undisguised surprise. "What are you doing here?"

"And how?" Original Cindy asked practically. "Everybody else got superpowers round here; you suddenly grow wings?"

Logan smirked; there could be no other word for the strange expression that overtook his normally benign feature. 

"Alec left his bike, didn't he? I figured I'd return it and pick up my car; save us both a little time on the switch."

The moment of stunned silence was gratifying to Logan at first, and then he began to find it just a little insulting. Before he could give his hurt feelings a vent, Alec managed to collect his thoughts enough to ask what they were all thinking.

"You know how to ride a motorcycle? A real one?" he added before he could help himself.

"Yes, I know how," Logan protested indignantly, suppressing the memory of his rather jolting ride through the back streets and deserted alleys of Seattle. It hadn't been a pleasant ride, and it bore little resemblance to what he remembered of learning to ride the gardener's dirt bike at his Uncle Josiah's summer home as a boy, but he'd managed it and he saw no reason to dwell on the details.

"That's... that's great, Logan." Alec shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts and focus on what was important. It was not, however, an easy task. "Thanks for returning my... oh god, my bike. You didn't... the bike is okay, right?"

Original Cindy stared at him in disbelief. "Man say he got a plan to get White off your back, and you worried about your bike? Men," she summarized with a snort.

Max knew exactly why Alec was concerned; had it been her motorcycle Logan had been driving she would have reacted much the same way as her fellow X5. She opened her mouth to explain to Original Cindy, and then snapped it shut again without making a sound. She had her pride, and after all, it wasn't like it was her bike they were talking about.

"Your bike is fine, but thanks for the vote of confidence," Logan said sarcastically. "Notice I didn't have the same panic attack over you borrowing my car?"

Alec frowned and cocked his head to the side. "I don't get the connection," he said impatiently.

Max decided it was time to take charge of the situation before they all choked on the testosterone fumes. "Logan, you said you had a plan to beat White's ass. Tell us a story and make it sweet one."

"Not here." Logan glanced around the busy 'war room'. "It's too distracting with everybody coming and going, and you know eventually they're going to start tossing in their own suggestions. And then they'll start disagreeing with each other's suggestions and then..."

Max held up her hand. "Enough said."

"We can go up to my apartment," Alec offered. "It's probably the only private place in TC that's big enough for all of us. Not that it's actually all that private..." he interrupted himself with a grin, "but since most of the people who would be interrupting us are already going to be there," he shrugged, "we should be good."

"Why don't we just invite them?" Logan suggested. "We'll need Joshua, and probably Brin too." He considered the options for a minute and then added, "Mole wouldn't be a bad idea either. I'm starting to get kind of warm and fuzzy about that bazooka he won't put down."

Max and Alec shook their heads and smiled with much the same degree of pity for Logan's innocence when it came to weapons. Original Cindy's expression leaned more towards sour disapproval.

"Man getting' a big old thing for guns," she grumbled, as though she had expected better of Logan. "Now ain't that a surprise?"

* * * * *

"You've got to be kidding," Max said flatly. "That's the big plan?"

She regretted her outburst the moment the words left her mouth; she hated to know that the hurt in Logan's eyes was her fault. But the stakes were high these days, even by Max's standards, and every time she contemplated their next move against White she came up against the inescapable fact that they were gambling with the life of a very small child. 

Alec's child.

"Our only hope is to take White by surprise," Logan said stiffly in the silence that followed Max's sharp comment. "Right now he's calling all the shots because he knows what he's really after and we don't. By forcing his hand and making him come to us before he's ready, we get some advantage back."

Max glanced over at Alec before she spoke, hoping that he would at last have some contribution to make to this conversation about his daughter's future. He gave no sign he'd even heard Logan's proposal, however; the whole of his attention was focused on the child herself, watching her 'teach' her stuffed panda to draw. Once upon a time Max would not have believed Alec could be so intent on anyone but himself, let alone so quiet about it, but she was beginning to become accustomed to his surprises.

"It's too risky, Logan," she said finally, when it became apparent that Alec was not going to comment. "If you really think White knows Alec is thinking of..." she stopped herself just shy of saying the unutterable words in front of 49614, "of what he's thinking when he's not really thinking," she hastily compromised, "we shouldn't be confirming it for him. I mean if Alec really is dumb enough to go through with it..."

"Max," Logan said quickly, "don't go there. Not now."

"I'm trying to be supportive," she protested. "If he really is going to do it, I just think it's probably not a good plan to tell the bad guys before we even get things set up. Shouldn't we be, oh say, giving them a fake plan? That's the way they taught us to operate at Manticore," she finished with the faintest trace of smugness overtaking her face. As intelligent as Logan was, he was at an undeniable disadvantage when it came to battle tactics; he simply didn't have the background.

"Manticore? You mean the place that burned to the ground a few months ago?" Logan regretted the sarcasm he heard in his voice, but decided it was better than the emotion it was masking. Of all the people in this room, he had the least right to feel anger about that night. "Oh, yeah, now those people knew their plans."

"It worked, didn't it?" Max asked bitterly. "Except for Renfro they all got away."

"And so did all the people they were trying to kill. You'd already destroyed the lab; all they covered up was historical data."

"Big talk from a guy who already knows what's been dog paddling in his gene pool," Mole growled from his post by the door. 

Joshua's ears perked up. "Dog paddle?" he asked hopefully. 

Original Cindy couldn't see this conversation going anywhere good for her girl, or anyone else, for that matter. It was time for cooler heads to prevail.

"So Logan, who you gonna get to play this sucker out?" she broke in. "Or are you really gonna ask your friends to be bait?"

Logan shook his head. "No, I feel bad enough that I used them in the first place to get this set up. Eyes Only has some contacts who can help, though. I'll start putting out the feelers tonight... after I, uh talk to him, of course."

"What about X5's?" Brin asked, focusing on the practical with effort. She was wholeheartedly with Max on this score; she didn't like this plan and she didn't trust this plan. But if Alec didn't say something soon, it looked like this plan was going to be _the_ plan. "We're a lot stronger and faster than any of White's men; it's the safest way."

"Joshua help too," Joshua chimed in anxiously. He was stronger than any of the X series and they all knew it.

"White can recognize transgenics, remember?" Logan said after a quick nod of assent in Joshua's direction. "He can pull them out of crowds, so he can sure as hell spot them when there's only a few people in the room. And he has to believe that the couple are human; otherwise it doesn't make sense."

"Like it makes sense anyway," Max grumbled under her breath.

"She won't be alone with them," Logan said to Original Cindy, pretending he hadn't heard Max's comment. He knew it had been directed more at Alec than at him, and he understood how deep the hurt ran that had prompted it. "It's not like White would buy it if we just dropped her off on their doorstep."

"Logan, don't." Max gestured to 49614, playing quietly in the corner of Alec's living room. The child seemed to be paying no attention to the adult conversation going on around her, even when it verged on an argument, but they already knew she understood much more than any of them felt comfortable with. 

"Joshua help too." There was a faint undertone of a growl in Joshua's voice as he repeated his offer. "Joshua... protect." The more he thought about Alec's little monkey being in the same room as White... being on the same planet as White... the more anxious the transgenic became. Nothing could go wrong with Logan's plan. Nothing.

"That's right, Joshua, we'll all be there with her," Logan said carefully. "Alec can pretend to... do what he's thinking of doing... and White will try to stop him. But this time we'll be ready for him."

"What if we're not?" Max asked desperately.

Alec came back to them at last, turning away from 49614 with resignation in his hazel eyes.

"Then she's dead," he said softly. "And so am I." He switched his tired gaze from Max to Logan. "When do we start?"

* * * * *

****

To Be Continued


	6. Chapter 6

In the Shadows

Part 6

By Gem

Alec sat on the edge of his bed and stared fixedly out one of his many bedroom windows, watching the sunrise.  Some part of his mind noted that the sky was lightening and faint streaks of red and orange were coloring the horizon, but the sum total only translated into one thing. 

Dawn.

Manticore had taught him that dawn was the time for missions to begin or to end, nothing more and nothing less, but this morning he was struggling to find that mental shield his upbringing should have provided.  He didn't want to wallow in the potential of a new day and a fresh start; those concepts were meant for people with normal lives and futures, not for transgenics.  Especially not for transgenics like him.

He had now spent... he took a quick glance at the clock on the nightstand... 86 hours and about 15 minutes with his daughter.  Eighty-seven hours if he counted the half-hour he spent with her in the Manticore nursery.  87 hours out of the nearly eighteen months that she'd been alive. 

Was the shortness of time supposed to make it easier, Alec wondered as he watched the sky without really seeing anything but his own dark thoughts.  It seemed like it should; after all, how could he really be attached to someone he'd spent less than a week with?  Someone who could barely talk, who still required periodic carrying despite genetically enhanced muscles, who needed to be monitored pretty much all of her waking hours for her own safety?

Eighty-seven hours and counting, but not counting for much longer.  He was supposed to be meeting Logan and his contacts, his daughter's "new parents," at ten for the next part of Logan's sting.  Hopefully the meeting would be interrupted by kicking White's inbred ass at around 10:15, and then it would be back to Terminal City for lunch.

And then, at 2 o'clock, the real surrender of his daughter to strangers was scheduled.

Logan said they were nice people, friends of his from college.  They'd been married for almost 7 years, worked out of their home and already had a 4-year-old son whom they'd adopted as an infant.  They were ready, willing, and as far as could be known, able to take on the task of raising a transgenic daughter. 

And without ever having met them, and in full knowledge of how lucky he was to find them, Alec hated them. 

Logan heard the pounding, and thought it was part of his dream. 

In the dream he'd been sitting between his parents in a darkened theater, and from the way he was squirming to see around the head of the man sitting in front of him, he was still just a boy.  He couldn't tell what was happening on the stage very well, thanks both to the man in front of him and the general haziness of dreams, but he recognized the music.  He'd heard that music before, or rather later, but he couldn't quite catch the melody.  Just a few more notes and he would...

Then the pounding began, and suddenly the stage was filled with clog dancers.  Very noisy, very angry clog dancers who began hurling their shoes at him because he refused to tell them the name of the song they were dancing to.  He tried to duck behind his father, but the dancers' aim was almost uncanny.  Logan was deeply grateful when the pounding intruded deeply enough into his brain to register as a knock on his door and he was forced to wake up and stumble downstairs to deal with his unexpected visitor instead of flying clogs.  And when he pulled open the door, he was even more grateful... if more confused.

"Max?"   Logan squinted and peered at her, and when the view didn't change he reached up to rub the sleep from his eyes in hopes of clarifying the situation.  Too late he remembered the glasses perched crookedly on his nose.  The pain of the nosepieces suddenly digging into the corners of his eyes made him wince, but it effectively chased the last of the fog from his brain.  "What are you doing here so early?" he asked, stepping back to let her come in the house.

He wasn't sure whether it was the hour of her visit that surprised him, or the fact that she had bothered to knock.  Transgenics, in his experience, were the enter-first-and-ask-permission later type.  Something to do with all the 'go forth and conquer' genes so carefully implanted in them, he supposed.

"I'm sorry," she mumbled as she slid past him in the doorway and made her way to the living room.  "I didn't mean to wake you up or anything... I guess I just forgot normal people sleep in sometimes."

He gazed doubtfully at the scarlet streaks in the sky as he closed the front door.  "Sleep in?  Max, it's like 5 am."

She turned on her heel and looked back at him, surprise written clearly on her face.  "Yeah, it's late."

With a sigh, he gave in.  There were some parts of Manticore too deeply ingrained to fight. 

"Okay, so what brings you here this late in the day?" Logan asked as he gestured for her to take a seat on the couch.  "Wait, no, can it wait until after I get just a little caffeine in my system?  I do much better when my blood stream isn't completely blood."

"I'd offer to make it for you, but..." she shrugged and turned up her hands, "I'd probably poison it."

He knew she was referring to the virus, and he also knew she was probably right, but the anger he felt at her words surprised him.  They'd been dealing, and sometimes not dealing, with the retrovirus for months now and most of the time he could keep his feelings about it locked away in a small corner of his heart where they couldn't wound Max or himself.  But lately too many things beyond the virus seemed to be slipping between them, and it was taking a lot more effort than usual these days to keep hold of his temper.

Still, for Max he would continue to make the effort, through gritted teeth if necessary.

"Oh I don't think your coffee is that bad," he drawled, not meeting her eyes.  "Or are you packing arsenic?"

She made a face at him, but accepted his deliberate misunderstanding without question.  They already had enough to deal with on this particular morning; there was no point in making an issue out of something that couldn't be helped.

"Why don't you go make your coffee and I'll watch?" she suggested.  "I seem to be doing a lot of that these days.  I'm probably gonna be really good at it before this is all over."

Logan led the way into the kitchen and then busied himself at the counter while Max paced back and forth by the back door.  It was almost a repeat of the morning 49614 had come into their lives, but Max was all too aware this was the day she was scheduled to leave it.  It was all Max had been able to think about since Logan laid out his plan two days before, and it was what had drawn her to Logan's door hours before she was supposed to be there.

"Logan," Max said as her steps slowed to a stop, "I want to meet them.  Now, before everything goes down."

He was grateful his back was to her when she spoke; Max's pain was his pain and he wasn't sure if he could have kept if from flooding back at her if she could see the look on his face.

"Meet them," he repeated as he stalled for time.  "And what 'them' are we talking about?  I know a lot of 'them', you know.  I'm a popular guy."

This time she wasn't letting him get away with sidestepping the problem.  "The people you're giving her to... your friends.  I want to meet them first.  Talk to them.  Explain... stuff."

He took a tight grip on his emotions and turned around to face her.  "Don't you think that's Alec's job?" he asked softly.

She met his eyes for an instant, and then her gaze slid away.  Her dark eyes focused on the back yard, unwillingly noticing how silent and strangely empty it was today.

"He can't," she said finally.  That had to be the answer; she had no other explanation for this strange lapse in his overall hands-on approach to parenting.  "The only way he's gonna be able to go through with this is if he does it all at once and never looks back."  Max made herself look at Logan, the hurt in her eyes almost blinding him.  "Except he won't be able to help looking back, and when he does I want to be able to tell him something about them.  I want him to know they understand as much as regular people can what it means to grow up transgenic, and that she'll be okay with them."

Logan pulled out a chair and sat down in a daze, leaving the coffee he'd thought so essential just a few minutes ago cooling on the countertop.

"Max, they're good people."

"I know."

"I've known them for years."

"I know."

He felt like he was talking to her through a soundproof wall.  No matter how much he exaggerated his words, or pounded on the barrier between them, he couldn't communicate with her.  "They know she's transgenic, and I've explained to them what that means."

"But you don't..." Max started to protest, and then stopped to figure out how to say what she needed to without hurting the man she loved.  "Logan, you know what they're going to see but you don't know how it feels.  And neither will they.  But if I talk to them, explain what it's like, then maybe it'll be like..." she shrugged helplessly, "it'll be like seeing what you see instead of hearing what you see."

He rubbed his fingers into the tight, aching spot that had suddenly developed at the base of his skull.  Max might think that they were just discussing her attitude towards Alec's daughter, but Logan could sense that this conflict was really just the latest eruption of a deeper problem.  He just wasn't sure if he could make her understand, or if she really wanted to.

"Max," he said slowly, "I know you want to help.  And I think that's great," he hastened to add, hoping he'd covered himself before she took his comment as a dismissal.  "I know there are things they're not going to be familiar with, like the whole heat cycle business, and you can help them help her with it when the time comes.  But for most of it..." Logan hesitated.  "She's not you, Max.  She's a transgenic, but for her it's going to be an almost entirely different experience than it's been for you."

"Being raised out on some farm by humans isn't going to change who she is, Logan," she snapped.

"It really will," he corrected her gently.  "Look, I'm just a garden variety human.  Plenty of looks and charm, of course," he smiled to make sure she knew he was teasing, "but no superpowers.  You could say the same for Sketchy, though, and Normal."

Max let out a derisive hoot.  "Normal?  Looks and charm?"

"So maybe I am one or two up on him," Logan admitted.  "But that's what I'm talking about.  Being human, ordinary human, isn't that great of a common denominator when you compare it to the experiences we have had and how they've shaped us.  The same thing can be said for transgenics; I mean, do you really see that much similarity between Alec and, say, Zack?"

"Oh please," she responded with a snort.  "Like Alec would have ever shot himself in the head to save my life."  _And like Zack would have ever spent a year of his life tracking down a child just to make sure she was okay_, Max's mind continued unwillingly.  She loved Zack, but she knew his idea of leadership wouldn't permit him to put the welfare of any one child, even his own, over the group as a whole.  If 49614 had been his daughter, she would have stayed lost.

"But they're both transgenics," Logan pointed out, breaking into her thoughts at a welcome juncture.  "If you want to look even closer, think of Alec and Ben."

"Ben was... sick," she mumbled.  "You can't compare him to anybody; it's not fair." 

'Fair' was not a word Logan would have applied to any part of the current situation, but now was not the time to veer off on that technicality.  "Fine, so what about you and Brin?  You were both in the same unit at Manticore, you had the same experiences there, and then you both escaped."  He paused for just a moment to let the first part of his argument sink in before he continued.  "But you still didn't have the same life on the outside.  And you're not the same people now."

She recovered her equilibrium and shot back, "Damn straight we're not."

"No, you're not.  The experiences you had shaped you into different people, just as Alec's little girl will have experiences you never had and maybe never even dreamed of.  A lot of what you know about being a transgenic she'll never know, and vice versa."

"That... that doesn't matter," she insisted stubbornly.  "She's going to be different from everyone around her, and I just want them to understand how it's going to make her feel.  How she might react."

"But you don't know how she might react."  Logan was determined to hold fast to his position; there was more at stake here than Max seemed willing to admit.  He had to make her understand, however long it took to get her there.  "Look, this has been coming on for a while now."

She frowned at him.  "What has?"

He took a quick look at his wrist, and then another at the clock on the wall when he realized his watch was still upstairs on the nightstand.  He had guessed correctly about the time; it was only about quarter after five, leaving several empty hours until the first act of this little drama was scheduled to begin.  Time enough, he decided, to set straight some things in his own life.

"You know what?  I'm hungry," he suddenly announced, getting to his feet.

"Logan..." she began.

He didn't let her finish.  "Come to breakfast with me," he said instead, smiling down at her.  "There's a great 24-hour diner... well, okay, there's a pretty good 24-hour diner not far from here.  I can't imagine they'd be all that busy at this hour, so we can talk in peace while we eat."

"Logan, I want to meet them," Max insisted.  "Feeding me isn't going to change my mind."

He had hoped to charm her into the idea, but he should have known smiles and soft words wouldn't wear down her determination. 

"Max, you can't meet them," he said flatly.  "They live a couple of hours away, remember?  We don't have time to get there and back before White and his storm troopers show up."

"I thought they were coming in yesterday," she said slowly.  "That's what Alec said you told him."

"Plans change," he said, lifting his shoulders in a quick, and hopefully casual, shrug.  "Now they're going to do the roundtrip in one day.  I'm sorry; I didn't know it was going to be a problem for you."

Max knew when Logan was keeping something from her.  She wasn't sure if it was a special sense she had of him, or he was just really bad at playing it cool, but she could always tell when there were things he was leaving unsaid.  The sensation right now was overwhelming, and made all the more uncomfortable by the deep certainty that what he was going to share she didn't want to hear.

"Maybe if you call them, they could start out earlier."  She didn't wait to see his reaction to her suggestion; he might sense a trap lay ahead if he caught a good look in her eyes.  "And then we'd still have time to talk before... well, before."  

"Are you sure you want to do this?  Are you sure you _can_ do this?"

"I have to," she said softly.  "I don't want him to do this; I still think it's the wrong thing for both of them.  But if he's really going to go through with it..." her voice trailed off as she forced herself to imagine the unimaginable.  "He's my friend.  I have to make sure he can live with this."

"Alec, open up.  I need to talk to you."

Brin's voice was soft but urgent, as was her knock on the apartment door.  She didn't want to scare the child inside, any more than she wanted to scare the child's father, but time was running short. 

It took a lot to sap the strength of an X5; they were designed to withstand grueling physical conditions without even breaking a sweat.  But the Alec who opened the door was not the same man Brin had come to know better than she'd ever intended in the past month.  That man always had a quick, easy smile, even if it didn't necessarily reach his eyes, and a breezy self-confidence that events might or might not justify.  He was all about presentation and making others feel the considerable force of his presence, and he was good at both.

This Alec smiled at her but it was a visibly strained expression of welcome, which matched his general air of weariness.  His clothes were clean but they had deep-set creases in them, as though he had maintained the same position for a very long time; this impression went oddly with the lingering dampness visible in the strands of his dark gold hair.  It was almost as though he had showered and dressed, and then lost interest in, or the energy for, doing anything else. 

"Are you okay?" she asked without thinking as she slipped past him into the apartment.  "You look like hell."

"Who, me?"  He flashed a half-wattage version of his usual smile as he pressed a hand to his chest in mock astonishment.  "I'm aces.  Never better."  Alec leaned against the doorjamb and crossed his arms over his chest.  "Why?"

Brin suddenly hated his smile, and the lazy, casual way he was standing.  Alec was raising a wall between them without giving her a chance to object, and after all the soul-baring she had done with him in the past few weeks she felt she deserved better than that.

"What part of 'you look like hell' is confusing you?" she snapped, not bothering to match his quiet tone.  She didn't realize just how loud her response had been until she saw Alec press his index finger to his lips as he cast an anxious look at his daughter's closed bedroom door.

"Do you mind?" he hissed. 

"Yeah, I pretty much do," she retorted, though she took care to lower her voice this time.  "I mind a lot of the stuff that's been going on the past few days, but mostly I mind being treated like I don't have two eyes.  Or a brain.  Don't play games with me, Alec."

Alec tore his eyes away from the closed door, although when he saw the stiff line of Brin's body and the set to her jaw he wanted very much to pretend that he'd heard something in his little girl's room that required his immediate attention.  Unfortunately, since Brin's hearing was every bit as good as his, it wasn't worth the additional fuel it would add to the fire.

"So when did you start channeling your little sister?" he asked slowly, searching for a better way out.  "I mean I kind of expect this sort of lecture from Max by now, but I thought we had something a little... friendlier going on."

She blushed at the memory of the night he'd kissed her... or she'd kissed him... she still wasn't sure who moved first.  They hadn't spoken of that night, or that kiss, since then, which only made the memory more powerful.

And Alec knew that, damn him, she fumed.  He knew it and he was using it to avoid her.

"We are friends, Alec," she answered, controlling her temper with no small difficulty.  "That's why I came here this morning, and that's why I'm still here even though you're doing your damnedest to make me regret it."

Abruptly Alec gave up trying to make Brin leave him alone; it wasn't worth the effort.  He strolled over to the sofa and carefully seated himself, focusing on the feel of the pillow behind his back and the fabric beneath his hand.  Focusing on anything but the thoughts circling like vultures in his head.

"Sorry, Brin, I'm just not looking for company this morning.  I have some things to do before we all head over to Logan's and I need to do them alone."

She hurried over and sat beside him on the sofa, gently resting one hand on his shoulder as she turned on the cushion to face his profile.  She tried not to notice him stiffen at her touch, but it took an effort.

"There's no time, Alec," she said urgently.  "We need to go to Logan's now; we can't wait for whatever it is you think you have to do."  She saw his lips start to part, but before he could contradict her, she hurried on.  "I'm sorry; I'm really not deliberately trying to antagonize you.  But that stuff you think you need to do is just to make yourself not think about what really needs to be done, if," she drew a deep breath, "you still want to go ahead with this."

He was absolutely, perfectly still for a split-second; just long enough for her to regret the day she learned how to talk. 

"Don't go there, Brin," he said at last.  "Not today."

She quickly pulled her hand away from his shoulder and dropped it in her lap, twisting the fingers of both hands together to keep from reaching out to him again. 

"All I'm saying is that there are things we need to do... we," she stressed the pronoun again, "need to take care of if everything is going to work out as planned.  And we need to be doing them now instead of you sitting around blaming yourself for not being who you think she needs."

"Is there any way I can get rid of you, short of throwing you through the door?" he asked in a bland, conversational tone.  "Not that I'm gonna need the door after today..."

"Come with me," she answered, getting to her feet.  "We all have that little kink in our hardwiring, Alec.  If you obey our orders, we shut up."

He still didn't get up, but at least he was looking at her now, and something close to life was showing in the depths of his hazel eyes.

"So what's the order?  Beyond going with you, I mean."

"We're going to Logan's," she said quickly.  Too quickly, she realized an instant later when his gaze slid away from her again. 

"We don't need to be there for a few hours," he said abruptly. 

He could feel her eyes on him, could feel her pity washing over him, and he couldn't stand it.  He tried to avoid her knowing glance, letting his eyes skip around the room until his attention was caught once more by the morning sky outside the living room window.  The red was fading from the horizon, and the sun was beginning to climb and burn away the stray clouds.  It was going to be a nice day; w_asn't that just a kick in the teeth?_

"We need to go now," Brin insisted.  "I already sent Joshua to find Max, and Mole is out stealing a car.  We'll be good to go in ten minutes, tops."

"That's not the plan."

"Exactly."  She sat down next to him again, since it was now apparent more convincing would be required.  "But the plan is also what we spoon-fed White, so I think maybe it would be a good idea if we went for Door Number 2."

"So we get there a few hours early; what difference does that make?"

"I don't know," she admitted.  "I just know if we planned on meeting at 9, and we let White think we're meeting at 10, then we probably should be meeting at 6."  She leaned forward again, but this time she made sure she didn't touch him.  He was still so distant, and any contact would only make him retreat further.  "White will be there hours early; you know that as well as I do.  He'll want to get all his men in place before we ever show, so we need to get into place before he ever shows."

She had his attention at last; Alec turned slowly to face her.

"And don't you think he'll get just a little suspicious if he sees us hiding our guys as he's hiding his guys?  If we don't make the grand entrance Logan has planned?"  He shook his head, though not without regret.  The idea of doing something... anything... to escape his thoughts for a little while was like the answer to a prayer.  Except... "If White smells a trap he'll melt away before we even get a bead on him and then she'll never be safe."

This was the hard part; this was the part they had all been trying to make him see, but the one truth he refused to face.

"She's never going to be completely safe, Alec.  None of us is.  And nothing any of us do today is going to change that.  But if we let White set the tempo then we're going to be as far away from safe as we can get."

His answer, the brilliant one he hadn't thought of yet, was forestalled by the sudden presence of a small figure in the doorway of the smaller bedroom.

"Daddy?" 49614 asked softly, glancing uncertainly from her father to Brin.  "We go now?"

He hadn't told her yet about Logan's friends, the ones who were planning on taking her away from him this very afternoon.  He had started to a hundred times, but something always stopped him, some inner voice that told him it would be easier on both of them if he waited until he was out of time and options.  He knew she sensed something was wrong though, so it really came as no surprise that she was already dressed and ready to leave.

If only he were as ready as she.

"Yup," he gave in with a sigh.  "We're going now, monkey.  Assuming Mole has managed to... borrow... a car that will fit all of us.  And assuming Max doesn't mind a certain somebody overriding Logan's plans."

"Which is assuming a lot," Brin allowed with her first small smile of the day.  "That's why I sent Joshua to tell her.  Making Max change her mind requires a lot more subtlety than I can come up with at zero dark thirty."

"Slacker," Alec chided her with a tiny smile of his own.  But she noticed he did not disagree.

Logan waved away another refill on his coffee, and waited until their waitress was out of earshot before he tried to return to the conversation he'd begun back at Joshua's house.

"Max, I know you want to help Alec, even though you don't agree with what he's decided.  And that's admirable.  But I think..." he paused and tried to capture the right words, "I think you need to figure out why you think he's wrong, beyond the whole 'blood' thing."

She looked at him strangely over her half-eaten plate of scrambled eggs.  "What else is there?  He's her father, she's his kid and they should be together."

"Agreed," Logan said hastily.  "But I think there's something more at work here, something that's been coming along for a while... maybe before you even met Alec."

"If you mean I think families belong together, then yeah; I've had that idea tumbling around in my head since I was a kid."

"No, I mean... it's not just because they're related, is it?  I mean blood is important, but isn't it a little more about the fact that they're both transgenics?  Both Manticore?"

She sensed a trap, but she couldn't see it yet.  Still, knowing it must be out there somewhere made her choose her words with unusual deliberation.

"I told you that before; I've told _Alec_ that before.  She's going to be different from other kids; she'll need help to fit in."

Logan took a quick swig of his coffee for courage.  "To fit in?" he echoed Max.  "Fit in with whom, Max?  Do you really want her to integrate into human society, or do you want her to be a part of Terminal City?  Because I think it's the second one, and I think," he sighed, "that's the problem."

"Excuse me?"  She hadn't been sure what to expect from Logan, but this wasn't even close to what she might have guessed.  "So because I think that Alec ought to keep the child he fathered, suddenly Terminal City is a bad idea?  How the hell does that track?"

"I'm not saying Terminal City is a bad idea.  I'm saying it's not the answer, as in the one and only answer to all of her problems, or yours."

"Tell me something I don't know," she replied with a scowl, thinking of the hundred and one administrative problems that faced her on a daily basis.

"I think I am," Logan admitted quietly.  "I don't know when it all started; if it was the virus, or Asha, or when you were captured or... maybe it all goes back to when Zack came to you for help to get Tinga out... I just don't know.  But at some point you gave up on the part of you that wanted to belong to this world, and you started to create your own world.  One where transgenics were the norm and the rest of us were the..."

"Freaks?" she asked bitterly.  "Is that the word you're searching for, Logan?"

"Maybe.  At least that's how you think we... humans... think of you and yours.  And now that you're building your own community of transgenics, that's how you're starting to see me and mine."

"Do you blame me?  After all you've seen the last few months... years?  The siege, White, Renfro, Lydecker?"

He leaned across the table, instinctively reaching for her hand.  For one frozen instant she watched him try to bridge the gap between them before she yanked her hand back into her lap in horror.

"The virus?" she demanded, more as an accusation than a question.  "Who does that make the freak, Logan?  The one whose body can be made into a weapon, or the one who made her that way?"

"It's not a contest, Max," he said desperately.  He forced his hands to grip his coffee mug, holding on as tight as he could to keep from trying to touch her again.  "It's not supposed to be us against them or," he swallowed hard, "you against us.  I thought the idea of Terminal City was to provide shelter for transgenics until we could all figure out how to live together, not provide an alternative to ever figuring that out."

"You don't understand."  She bit her lip in frustration.  "It's not safe out there for them, not yet."

He pressed on, making himself disregard the hurt look in her dark eyes.  "And when will it be?  _How_ will it be, if you keep on seeing transgenics as some sort of separate species from the rest of us?  You're proving White's point for him, for God's sake."

"I'm trying to keep them alive," she retorted in a low angry voice.  "And if you think that makes me some sort of a bigot, then that's your problem, not mine."

Logan closed his eyes and tried to figure out how he'd screwed up so badly.  He wanted to reach Max; no, he needed to reach her.  But the ideas he knew were right were all coming out in words he knew were wrong.  Somehow, some way, there had to be a right path and he had to find it.  Otherwise, nothing else would matter.

"My problem," he said slowly as he opened his eyes, "is that you don't really want to let any of this be my problem.  You want my help, but you don't want to want my help.  And that," he clenched his fingers so tightly the ceramic handle of the cup fractured in his hands, "that kills me, Max.  I love you.  Virus or no virus, I want to find a way to share my life with you.  But you... what do you want, Max?  I'm almost afraid to ask anymore."

"I want..." she looked frantically out the window of the diner, searching the dingy street for a name to give to the wordless yearnings that kept her up at night.  "I want to go to bed without wondering how I'm going to feed 300 people the next morning.  I want to sleep without keeping one eye open for those storm troopers you were talking about swarming over the fence, or Familiars oozing up through the drains.  I want to wake up and know that the worst thing I'm going to have to deal with all day is Normal chewing my ass for being late to work."  She made herself look at Logan, knowing she owed it to him to look him in the eye when she answered the question he was really asking.  "I want to know that the people I love are safe, from anybody who wants to hurt them... and from me, who doesn't want to hurt them but sometimes can't help it."

"Then don't push us away."  The pleading in his simple words came through as much in the intensity of his blue eyes as the tone of his quiet voice.  "Everything you want for yourself, Max, I want for you too.  And I think the key to getting it is to start thinking of Terminal City as an address and not a hiding place."  He hesitated over his next words; he didn't want to give her what could turn out to be false hope.  But in the end he had to say it, because evading was one thing but he couldn't flat-out lie to her.  "Maybe if you can do that, and you can make the others see it too, Alec won't feel like he has to give his daughter away to give her a normal life."

"That's not fair!"  The words burst out in a tone much louder than she intended.  But she couldn't believe her ears; she couldn't believe Logan would blame Alec's choice on her.  "I begged him to keep her.  I told him over and over that he could give her everything she needs."

He nodded sadly.  "What she needs as a transgenic.  That's not what he wants for her, Max, any more than that's what you wanted for yourself once upon a time.  You wanted to be yourself, but not be set apart because of it.  Somewhere along the way you lost the second part of that dream, and until you find it..." he pried his fingers loose from the remains of the ruined cup and spread his arms wide as he shrugged his shoulders, "you're lost.  And she's lost."

"Logan..."

"And I'm lost," he finished quietly.  "Is that how you want it all to end?"

With the need for stealth paramount, Alec didn't even consider leading them through the front door of Logan's house, much less indulging Logan's request for a warning knock before entering.  Instead they parked around the corner and slipped in through the back lots, an odd parade of obvious and not-so-obvious transgenics, led by Alec and 49614.

Once inside the house, Alec called out softly to Logan, but received no reply.  After another unsuccessful attempt, he left his daughter in Joshua's care and searched the upstairs, reasoning that human hearing might require either greater volume or proximity to pull a man from the depths of sleep.  Whether his theory was true or not he was unable to determine, since he quickly found that there were no humans in the house to waken.

He walked slowly down the stairs, lost in thought, to find only Brin waiting for him in the living room.

"Where's..."

"They're in the kitchen," she answered, saving him the trouble of finishing a question she already knew he would ask.  "Mole is scouting the perimeter, finding new positions for us besides the ones we already decided on.  He figured it would be safer that way."

Alec raised his eyebrow.  "He figured or you figured?"

"Do you really see Mole letting me give the orders?" she asked, matching his skeptical tone shade for shade.  "Me?"

"Good point."

"So where's Logan?  Did you tell him he doesn't need to get all dressed up just for us?"  She glanced at the stairs Alec had just descended, raising her voice slightly for the benefit of anyone who might be hovering on the second floor landing.  "It's not like we didn't all grow up in barracks or anything; one layer is more than enough covering."

"Somehow I don't see Logan going commando just because it wouldn't bother you if he did.  And you know, I'd really rather not see him going commando at all, so hey, thanks for the imagery."  Alec flung himself on the sofa, trying to force his rigid muscles into something resembling relaxation.  "Anyway, he's not here.  And since Max wasn't in her room either... well, let's just say I'm guessing wherever he is, he's not alone and he's not unwilling."

Brin pushed his feet off the sofa so that she could sit down beside him.  "Oh come on, do you really think they're thinking about that today of all days?"

Alec threw one arm over his eyes and shrugged.  "Why should today be any different than any other day?" he mumbled, trying to convince himself as much as Brin.

"Because it is and they know it.  Because whether you want to believe it or not, they both care about you... like a lot of other people do... and they want to help however they can."

Slowly he drew his arm away from his face and sat up, looking at Brin without a trace of his normal levity.  "Even if there's a limit to how much they can help, because some things just are and can't be helped?"

She sighed heavily as she leaned back against the sofa cushions.  "I get the message, Alec, though I think I like it better when you just do the straight 'don't go there'."

He shook his head, smiling without humor.  "No, you don't."

"But I want to," she countered.  "At least then I know you're being honest."

"Never trust me when I'm being honest, Brin; that's when I'm most dangerous."

She smiled wryly, recognizing a truth to his words even he couldn't see.  "Only to yourself."

The ringing of Logan's telephone broke the awkward silence that had suddenly descended between them.  They turned as one to stare at the source of the noise, and then with a shrug Alec got up and crossed the room to answer it.

"Alec here.  Talk to me."

"Always a pleasure, 494," White said from the other end of the line.  "Especially when I know I'm going to get the last word."

Brin could sense the sudden shift of energy in the room the minute Alec answered the phone.  Some animal instinct bred in the mosaic she called her DNA could almost smell the change, like the scent of ozone in the air after lightning strikes.  Something was wrong, very wrong.

"Alec, what is it?"

He wanted to signal her to be quiet, but all his attention was focused on the voice at the other end of the phone. 

"You know, I'm kind of big on getting the last word myself," the transgenic drawled, pretending a calm he wasn't even close to feeling.  "In fact, I'll go for it now, unless you have something you really need to share."

"How about a bomb?  Is that worth sharing?"

For one moment blinding panic surged through Alec's veins, and then it was as though a switch flipped in his brain, leaving him cold inside.  White was declaring war, and winning wars was what he'd been built for.  "Sounds a little messy to me."

"Oh, not this one."  White sounded cheerful, perky even.  "It's very small, self-contained... well, you know just what it's like.  Do you remember the one I put in your neck?"

Brin was right behind him now; Alec could feel the heat of her body radiating against his back.  He knew she was trying to show that she was there to support him, ready and willing to let him lean on her for a change, but it didn't matter now.  Nothing mattered his daughter and White, and what had occurred when those two lives intersected.

"What did you..."

"Like father, like daughter.  One little needle and you've got more in common than you ever dreamed of."

The ice in Alec's veins melted in the space between heartbeats, washing away the veneer of soldier and leaving only the father.  Manticore had beaten, bludgeoned and drugged him until he literally couldn't see straight, but no physical blow had ever made him so sick or dizzy as White's blithely delivered cliché.  He gagged on the scream building in the back of his throat, trying to shape it into intelligible words.

"You son of a bitch!"

"Alec, who are you talking to?"

Alec didn't answer her.  Even if he had heard Brin's question, he had no time to calm her fears when his own were so wildly out of control.  "How could you..."

"Now there's a dumb question," White interrupted.  "You know how.  One little hypo.  In her back, though, not her neck... just so we're clear."

"Her back?"  He felt an insane moment of gratitude; at least it wasn't near her skull.  White wasn't trying to kill her... at least not yet. 

"Well I don't want to blow her head off, now do I?  At least not yet," White continued, unwittingly echoing Alec's thoughts.  "It's at the base of her spine; all that's going to do is short out her nervous system, right?  And hey, with her regenerative powers I'm sure she'll be fine.  Eventually."

Alec shook off Brin's hand, the one he could dimly feel biting into his arm.  He needed that arm to keep his body propped up against Logan's desk instead of falling to his knees.  He needed to hold on to that much illusion of strength and dignity because the rest was about to be thrown at White's feet.

"What do you want, White?"  

"White?" Brin repeated urgently.

"I know you want something," Alec continued.  "You always do."  He licked his dry lips and tried to force his chaotic thoughts into some sort of order again.  White was all about games; sick, twisted games.  As long as Alec played along, his little girl would survive...

He hoped.

"I want 49614, of course.  For the time being, anyway."

"You already had her at the orphanage."   He felt a flicker of triumph at the momentary silence that ensued; score one for the good guys.   Apparently White hadn't known they'd recognized his fine hand in the fire and subsequent rescue.

"Sure I had her," White conceded with a fraction less than his normal cockiness.  He recovered quickly, however, adding, "But she's not nearly as interesting without her DNA source, or at least half of her DNA source."

"You want me too."  Alec felt stupid; they should have guessed White would only have spared her as a scientific curiosity.  And as such she was only valuable as part of a set.

"The people I work for want you," White corrected him.  "I'd just as soon snap your neck and toss you out for the sanitation crews to clean up.  But my supervisors would like to know how much of what she can do is inherited, so we know what we could be facing if Terminal City isn't terminated before the rats begin to breed."

The transgenic took one long cold moment to review his options.  He really didn't doubt that White had done exactly what he said; the question now became one of worst case scenarios, and how any of them could be survived. 

"I'm still not seeing why I should turn her or myself over to you, White.  We have demolition experts at Terminal City; what makes you think we can't dismantle or remove this thing in time?"

Thing; he had to think of it as a 'thing.'  If he let himself remember what White had really done to his baby, he wasn't sure he could hold it together long enough to talk his way out.

"Time really doesn't come into play here," White drawled, "at least not in the sense that you have it to play with.  You see, the bomb isn't on a timer."  He gave Alec a moment to feel relief, a moment to feel the noose loosening before he tightened it again.  "It works with a remote detonator.  My men are stationed all round that old wreck my father called his home, just waiting for a call from me to tell them whether or not they should flip the switch.  And if you're not up for a little swap meet... boom."

Alec stalled for time.  "Swap meet?" 

White sighed loudly at the deficiencies in 494's upbringing.  Obviously Manticore didn't care whether or not their walking weapons could function in society, only that they could eliminate the right segments of it on command.

"Would you prefer the term 'prisoner exchange'?  Does that have more cultural resonance for you?"

"Go on."

"I said the people I work for want to study you and the kid; that's why they allocated me the manpower and funding to set this trap.  But you know what I want, 494.  Or at least you should by now; I gave you almost four days to get a clue about what fatherhood is all about."

"Your son," Alec answered flatly. 

"Hey, maybe the old man really did shoot a few brain cells into the test tube along with all the bat wings and puppy dog tails."  The mocking tone in White's voice abruptly vanished, leaving the same jagged edges Alec could hear in his own voice.  "Yeah, my son.  The one your bitch friend has been keeping from me all these months."

"I don't have your son, White.  I don't even know where he is."

"But she does," White hissed, emphasizing 'she' in such a way as to leave no doubt whom he meant.  "And she'll trade him for you two in a heartbeat."

"You can't ask me to..."

"I'm through asking, 494.  You come see me... now... and I'll have the bomb removed.  Play hard to get and you'll have a second chance to see your little girl take her first steps.  In about six months, that is, give or take a month."

Alec shook his head impatiently, trying to banish the image that White's words conjured up; he couldn't afford to lose control again.  "Your men will take us?"

"They're ready and waiting, practically chomping at the bit.  In fact, they're so eager to see you that if they don't see you and the little girl on the porch in three, count 'em, three minutes... well, saying 'boom' would be a little repetitive at this point."

"Three minutes."  Alec clung to the reality of a time limit, no matter how horrifying.  It was a fact and therefore had a solidity he could fight.  "You know she's a kid, and a girl besides, so sometimes it takes a little longer to..."

"Two minutes and fifty-three seconds," White broke in.  "Need I say more?"

Alec slammed down the phone on Logan's desk, yelling "Joshua!" before the instrument even hit the wooden surface.

Brin grabbed for his arm again, this time not letting her hands be shaken away.  "Alec, what is going on?  What did he want?"

She knew what White wanted; she'd heard enough of Alec's end of the conversation to figure it out.  But she needed to hear it from Alec, or more specifically, she needed to hear from Alec that she was wrong.  She needed Alec to do what he had been doing since the first night they met:  reassure her that good things were as likely to happen as bad, and that she had the power to make one into the other if she chose to use it.

But Alec had no time for Brin's issues now, or for anything else beyond his daughter's perilously short future.  "Josh!" he yelled again, just as the dog-man came running into the room with 49614 in his arms.

"Alec need Joshua?"

Alec snatched his daughter from his friend's arms, holding her against his heart long enough to feel a quick, wordless prayer for her safety well out of him, and then he dropped to one knee and stood her up in front of him. reaching around behind her to look beneath her little shirt.

It was there, right where White had said it would be, a small raised circle just beneath the skin at the base of her spine.  Alec's trembling fingers reached for it, but stopped a scant centimeter above the perimeter of the device, lest his touch destabilize it in some way.

"You said... you mentioned a bomb.  Alec, where did White put the bomb?"  Brin's voice was small now, as small as she felt in the face of a tragedy whose borders she could not bear to envision. 

"Bomb?" Joshua echoed, looking quickly from Brin to Alec, and then down to the child in Alec's arms.  He knew White's history with bombs, and his sharp eyes caught the bump under 49614's skin almost as soon as Alec's.  "White put bomb in..."

"I need you to find Max," Alec said sharply, putting an end to Joshua's statement of the unendurable.  He stood up and swung his daughter up into his arms again.  "White's men are outside and I... we... have to go with them.  We have to go now," he stressed.  "So I need you to find Max and Logan and tell them White wants to trade his kid for Johanna.  And unless Max wants that kid to be raised by a sociopath, you tell her I need her ass-saving skills and I need them ASAP."

Brin and Joshua shared a puzzled glance.  It was a small detail, and in the midst of all this potential disaster it should have been an inconsequential one.  Yet that made it seem all the more important to pin down, as though this one small saving grace might save them all.  "Johanna?" they asked in unison.

"Yeah."  Alec knew this wasn't the right time, and that if he didn't get moving there never would be a right time, but he still needed to make sure this point was understood by one and all.  "Your name is Johanna," he told his daughter firmly.  "It's not 49614; it never was.  It's Johanna; do you understand?"

She nodded.  "Johanna understand."

He let out a deep breath at this smallest of victories.  He had crossed a line he'd never intended to, and one from which he could not retreat, but at the moment it felt like the only right thing he'd ever done. 

"But why..." Brin began.

"Later," Alec said abruptly.  "I hope.  Now find Max while I go with White to get this damned bo... b-o-m-b taken out of my kid's back."

"Alec not to swear in front of little monkey," Joshua said automatically.  A moment later he realized he'd already forgotten to call Johanna by her new name, but Alec's mind was on other things.

"Buddy," he said as he strode to the door, "If we all last long enough to hear her start swearing on her own, I'll be the happiest guy in the room."

"You put a bomb in her back?"

White didn't seem to have heard his assistant's incredulous question.  The instant he'd hung up the phone he was up and pacing the length of his office, too wired to sit still any longer.  "We're a go, Otto.  In thirty minutes they should be here, and the lab boys can get to work on those tests."

"After they remove the bomb," Otto stressed, hoping to lead White back to what he found a salient, and heretofore undisclosed, fact.

"Of course after they remove the bomb."  White scowled at the question, one he considered obtuse even by Otto's standards.  "We can't have that rattling around in her while they're doing the tests; the adrenal production would be off the charts for both of them."

Otto clung ferociously to his last scrap of sanity.  "And it's dangerous.  It could hurt her."

"And if it couldn't 494 wouldn't have much reason to pay us a social call, now would he?"  White stopped pacing and turned to stare at his assistant.  "What's the matter with you today?  Did you forget the stakes in this little game?"

Otto wanted to forget the stakes in what White was now calling a game, but he wouldn't let himself.  He couldn't.  He was trading one child's life for another, and he had to believe that the one he had chosen to preserve carried the better chance for happiness and productivity.  Genetics had to count for something, as did a "normal" upbringing, whatever that was these days.  But looking at his boss today, hearing the casual tone in his voice as he discussed maiming a child... even a transgenic child... Otto wished he were still as sure as he'd once been that Ray White had the advantage.  He wished even more that this uncertainty had presented itself sooner, when something might be done to alter White's course. 

Now it was too late.

"No sir, I remember the stakes."  Otto cast about for a reasonable explanation to offer a not-always-reasonable man.  "It's just...I, uh, thought it was only a tracking device.  Sir."

White didn't usually bother to gauge his assistant's moods; it wasn't that he couldn't but it usually wasn't worth the effort.  Today, though, he couldn't help but read a certain amount of reluctance in Otto's face and voice, and he knew the source without asking.  Their work was not for the squeamish, but the next few days, or possibly weeks, would test the limits of even the strongest stomachs.  It was up to him to set the example, to remind everyone that these were transgenics, not people, and even the smallest of them would eventually be a danger to the rest of humanity.

_Not to mention what trouble they posed for the Fellowship_, he thought wryly.  Humans were one thing, but Ames White wasn't about to sacrifice his family for the freak parade that constituted his father's midlife crisis.

"It is a tracking device," he replied with a deliberately casual shrug.  "It's just not only a tracking device.  Can't very well have a bomb wandering around god knows where, can we?  We had to be able to trace it and her until we retrieved them."

"And now she's coming in?  They're coming in?"

"That's right."  White rubbed his hands together briskly.  "Busy day ahead, Otto.  Busy, busy day.  But every second of it brings me that much closer to finding Ray."

_Right, finding Ray._  Otto reached up to massage his aching forehead, hoping White couldn't see the slight tremor in his hands.  _Finding Ray and reuniting him with his father was a good thing; it had to be.  _

It had to be.

To Be Continued 


End file.
